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In Cities in the Sea, Maura Stanton taps into the mysterious force of the fairy tale, with its fantastic images and magical narrative patterns. Her stories blur the boundaries between fairy tale and verité, and comment on the art of storytelling. A range of characters—from a business man to a pianist, from a county coroner to a hardware store clerk, from a Greek immigrant to a Danish artist—come to discover that the past is a ruined kingdom, lost forever, but still a place to visit in wish, dream, and memory. Throughout her stories, Stanton attempts to wrest a deeper pattern, full of humor and wonder, out of the disturbing events of contemporary life.

In accessible poems full of rich detail and painterly images, Maura Stanton looks under the surface of the ordinary, hoping to find the magic spark below the visible. In poems both humorous and elegaic, she gathers strange facts, odd events, and overlooked stories to construct her own vision of immortality, one made up of fragments of history and geography and the illusions of yearning human beings. From elephants in Ceylon to Nazi prisoners in Ireland, from Beowulf to Jane Austen, from sonnets to prose poems to blank verse, Immortal Sofa conjures our complex existence in all its sorrowful but astonishing variety.