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The Finger Bone
A collection of poetry by Kevin Prufer.
- GenresPoetry
88 pages, Paperback
First published March 1, 2002
28 people want to read
About the author
Kevin Prufer
47 books26 followersKevin Prufer's newest poetry collection, The Fears, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2023 and received the 2024 Rilke Prize. His new novel Sleepaway was published in 2024 by Acre Books. He is also the author of several other books of poetry, including The Art of Fiction (2021), How He Loved Them (2018), Churches (2014), In a Beautiful Country (2011), and National Anthem (2008), all from Four Way Books.
He's edited several volumes of poetry, including New European Poets (Graywolf Press, 2008; w/ Wayne Miller), Literary Publishing in the 21st Century (Milkweed Editions, 2016; w/ Wayne Miller & Travis Kurowski), and Into English: Poems, Translations, Commentaries (Graywolf Press, 2017; w/Martha Collins).
With Wayne Miller and Martin Rock, Prufer directs the Unsung Masters Series, a book series devoted to bringing the work of great but little known authors to new generations of readers through the annual republication of a large body of each author's work, printed alongside essays, photographs, and ephemera.
Prufer is a professor in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston and the low-residency MFA at Lesley University.
Among Prufer's awards and honors are many Pushcart prizes and Best American Poetry selections, numerous awards from the Poetry Society of America, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Lannan Foundation. His poetry collection How He Loved Them was long-listed for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize and received the Julie Suk Award for the best poetry book of 2018 from the American literary press.
Born in 1969 in Cleveland, Ohio, Kevin Prufer studied at Wesleyan University (BA), Hollins College (MA) and Washington University (MFA).
He's edited several volumes of poetry, including New European Poets (Graywolf Press, 2008; w/ Wayne Miller), Literary Publishing in the 21st Century (Milkweed Editions, 2016; w/ Wayne Miller & Travis Kurowski), and Into English: Poems, Translations, Commentaries (Graywolf Press, 2017; w/Martha Collins).
With Wayne Miller and Martin Rock, Prufer directs the Unsung Masters Series, a book series devoted to bringing the work of great but little known authors to new generations of readers through the annual republication of a large body of each author's work, printed alongside essays, photographs, and ephemera.
Prufer is a professor in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston and the low-residency MFA at Lesley University.
Among Prufer's awards and honors are many Pushcart prizes and Best American Poetry selections, numerous awards from the Poetry Society of America, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Lannan Foundation. His poetry collection How He Loved Them was long-listed for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize and received the Julie Suk Award for the best poetry book of 2018 from the American literary press.
Born in 1969 in Cleveland, Ohio, Kevin Prufer studied at Wesleyan University (BA), Hollins College (MA) and Washington University (MFA).
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
November 25, 2008
Kevin Prufer's articulate poems--wild, touching, darkly funny--suggest a world poised between nightmare and lucid dream, a place where memory, mortality, and their abandoned remnants recur in thoughtful, even obsessive, poetic reconfigurations. For Prufer, the wrecks of cars are “very sleepy...soft/in their rivets and rotted joints” (“Salvage Lot, Dusk”), but they are also bodies we manufacture, abstract versions of ourselves: in listening to “The black hearts of automobiles/under the hoods,” we hear our own dark hearts subject to fatal accident or chance. Prufer at times adopts the stance of scientific investigator, only to find that objective inquiry leads to its own dead ends: “Technophobic Sonnet,” for example, equates a small park’s demolition with a disk drive’s swift erasure. Several poems called “For the Dead” confirm Prufer’s destination, the deepest impulse of his work: “I am trying to sing a clearer song, don’t go” (“For the Dead: A Clearer Song”). That plea--for a listener’s attention, for all those elegized not to disappear--comes as the book achieves its beautiful, terrible final insights: “The dead are as an echo resounding off a wall/on which someone has painted the shapes of stars” (“Trompe L’Oeil”). Even as he makes strange a world grown too familiar, Prufer offers us a new one, beautiful and dangerous, in a voice both original and haunting.
October 29, 2018
3.5* I’m not sure if the book get better in the last third or if I started to get more tuned in to the style or voice of the poems. Either way, last third starting with the burning hotel was great.
April 9, 2010
Starting out I was excited by his language, his use of juxtapositions & leaps of creativity. I love the poem "The Wreckers," where he writes, "Conch-eared and dirty, slick in our jeans—we had a stylish/consumption,"
Repeated images include: automobiles, red trucks, helicopters, rivets, telescopes, stars, bugs, boys & the dead. In the poem "Things are Inherent in Things," a man in a burning down hotel sits on the bed in a towel after a shower observing his surroundings thinking, "One thing, I believe, is inherent in another—shadows in clouds,/laughter in the mouth, smoke or flames in what is combustible. Have I been awful in my life?/I have friends. I call my mother each week long-distance,/am good to those I work with—even generous./The contracts, spread across the bed, could burn. The briefcase could burn,/and so could each diskette. I would not trade them for myself". There is a sense of removal, of time stopped. I slowed down and reread this poem to fully grasp what might make this man not act like the others who he watched jumping from the windows. What his inherent acceptance of death meant. His writing on death intensifies with his series of "For the Dead" poems near the end of the book.
Objects take on human characteristics, as in, "The cars are very sleepy, the cars are soft/in their rivets and rotted joints."
As I approached the end of the book I felt myself tiring, straining to understand what seemed overly obtuse metaphors in some poems. The language was no longer as exciting as when I started the book. Still, I want to read more poems by this author and feel my writing has been informed, and my creativity sparked from the liberties he takes and the crafting. I believe this is a deep book, which takes slowing down to read because the meanings are not obvious in his leaps. But I also believe he could make some poems more accessible.
Repeated images include: automobiles, red trucks, helicopters, rivets, telescopes, stars, bugs, boys & the dead. In the poem "Things are Inherent in Things," a man in a burning down hotel sits on the bed in a towel after a shower observing his surroundings thinking, "One thing, I believe, is inherent in another—shadows in clouds,/laughter in the mouth, smoke or flames in what is combustible. Have I been awful in my life?/I have friends. I call my mother each week long-distance,/am good to those I work with—even generous./The contracts, spread across the bed, could burn. The briefcase could burn,/and so could each diskette. I would not trade them for myself". There is a sense of removal, of time stopped. I slowed down and reread this poem to fully grasp what might make this man not act like the others who he watched jumping from the windows. What his inherent acceptance of death meant. His writing on death intensifies with his series of "For the Dead" poems near the end of the book.
Objects take on human characteristics, as in, "The cars are very sleepy, the cars are soft/in their rivets and rotted joints."
As I approached the end of the book I felt myself tiring, straining to understand what seemed overly obtuse metaphors in some poems. The language was no longer as exciting as when I started the book. Still, I want to read more poems by this author and feel my writing has been informed, and my creativity sparked from the liberties he takes and the crafting. I believe this is a deep book, which takes slowing down to read because the meanings are not obvious in his leaps. But I also believe he could make some poems more accessible.
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March 1, 2016Kevin Prufer is original, quirky, and at home in his craft. I especially enjoyed his poems for the dead, for astronauts, and for archaeologists. I won’t quote passages because it frankly hurt my eyes to read this book. Prufer writes in unusually long lines, often 20 syllables, which is twice the length of a sonnet line and longer than lines in the novel I’m reading. For that reason, I assume, the publisher used uncomfortably small type. For those with 20-20 vision, this may not be a problem. This collection won the William Rockhill Nelson Award in 2003, so apparently some readers were able to look past this obstacle. I was prepared to love it since (1) he awarded the book prize to Michael Bazzett for You Must Remember This and (2) I enjoyed hearing him once at a reading.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews