Giant Moth Perishes

by Geoffrey Nutter

With exquisite detail and humble sensibilities, Geoffrey Nutter’s sixth collection of poetry offers myriad delights in language and the imagination. In cityscapes, nature, books, and color, we find respite in the complexities of the commonplace―from clocks to teardrops to moths. The poems in Giant Moth Perishes teach us how to live in the world with curious attention. And at the heart of this daydreaming is a spectacular earnestness, firmly embedded in the idea that the landscape of poetry is limitless and wild.

Genres: Poetry

128 pages, Hardcover

Published May 4, 2021

About the author

Geoffrey Nutter was born in Sacramento, and attended San Francisco State University and the Iowa Writer's Workshop. He is the author of Christopher Sunset (Wave Books, 2010), Water's Leaves & Other Poems (Winner of the 2004 Verse Press Prize) and A Summer Evening, winner of the 2001 Colorado Prize (Center for Literary Publishing, 2001). His poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including The Best American Poetry 1997, The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries and Isn't It Romantic: 100 Poems by Younger American Poets. Geoffrey currently teaches in New York City, where he lives with his wife, daughter and son.

For more information on this author, go to:
http://www.wavepoetry.com/authors/24-...

Reviews

[Kate · Rating 4 out of 5]

The poems are interesting, but I had a hard time finding an emotional connection.

[Patricia N. McLaughlin · Rating 3 out of 5]

“How do the words dream together?
How to make you live inside their dream?” —Geoffrey Nutter, “Mysterious Travelers”

Two questions this collection of poems seeks to answer with greater and lesser clarity.

“And as all things go off beyond the gaslight
to settle on the so-called bottom
of the so-called subconscious serenely,
at rest but lifting their bulk
above the waters and into the light
from time to time . . .”

so, too, these poems shine briefly
then fizzle and sink like animadversions
in the wave of the sea called the Sea.

Favorite Poems:
“The Actuarial Fallacy”
“Study of Blue”
“The City That Would Never Be Finished”
“The Gathering Sea”

[Jacob MacDonald · Rating 3 out of 5]

The form evaded me; The book was hard to read aloud even when I tried. Nature intrudes in density. The obsession with the tension between the world and the city is right up my alley: It has me curious about Nutter's explicitly-city book. The ocean looms just off-screen when it's not on.