ABOUT THIS BOOK

Through poems of witness, species and habitat extinction, war, pandemic, technology, history, and race, Mark Irwin’s elegant collection of poetry explores the collision between metropolis and wilderness, and engages with forms of spirit that cannot be bound. With the incursion of electronic communication, our connections with one another have been radically distorted. Irwin’s poems confront what it means to be human, and how conflict, along with the interface between technology and humanity, can cause us to become orphaned in many different ways. But it is our decision to be joyful.

Excerpt from “Letter”
Times when we touch hope like the hem of a cloud
just as when we touch a body or door, or think
of the dead come back, romancing
us through the warp of memory, lighting a way
by luring . . .

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Mark Irwin is the author of eleven collections of poetry, including his most recently published work, Shimmer. His poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Atlantic Monthly, The Nation,The New York Times, and Paris Review. Recognition for his work includes The Nation/Discovery Award, two Colorado Book Awards, four Pushcart Prizes, the James Wright Poetry Award, the Philip Levine Prize for Poetry, and fellowships from the Fulbright, Lilly, and NEA. A professor in the PhD in Creative Writing & Literature Program at the University of Southern California, he lives in Los Angeles and rural Colorado.

REVIEWS

“Joyful Orphan is skilled, masterful work.”
—Sherwin Bitsui, Navajo writer and poet, author of Flood Song

“This collection is a deft and elegant lyric address, beautifully inclusive, to all the issues now of greatest concern.”
—Donald Revell, professor of English, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and author of The English Boat

“Joyful Orphan is a beautiful book of poems that, while quiet and often domestic, have a long, larger view.”
—Sasha Steensen, professor of English, Colorado State University, and author of House of Deer

“Joyful Orphan raises the question of belonging, and chooses the position of the orphan, who in Mark Irwin’s ecstatic poems, finds home everywhere. Who goes farther than that?”
—Claudia Keelan, professor of English, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, editor of Interim, and author of eight collections of poetry, including We Step into the Sea

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Alive

Just once

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