BOOKS

BUrn the Field

Cockfights, a prophetic turnip, the "pharmack mysteries" of antidepressants . . . in this book the natural world looms as a potent and nearly conscious metaphor for desire, transcendence and loss. The power in these poems comes from a persistently idiosyncratic combination of subject, language and tone: the dark emotion energy of the subjects—illness, witch trials, lost children—the lush, urgent language, and the exacting, wry, relentlessly unsentimental tone

Now make an Altar

Out of this book's gathering of speakers (arsonist, leper, Captain Haddock, the maitre d' of an unusual restaurant) and subjects (dung beetle, Aristophanes, medieval surgeon, methamphetamines) emerges a baroque, musical, and formally inventive history of creation and destruction. Now Make an Altar dispassionately suggests that there can't be one without the other. And there is nothing, however broken, absurd, atrocious, or sublime that cannot be brought into ecstatic focus in this "mysterious feast" of dense and exacting language. "Come in, come sup," Beeder invites us in the book's opening poem. "You'll never feel full."

And so wax was made & also honey

Forthcoming from Tupelo Press