Illinois Poetry

3 total works

American Ghost Roses

by Kevin Stein

Published 1 January 2005

In his first book as the poet laureate of Illinois, Kevin Stein shoulders an array of poetic forms, blending pathos, humor, and social commentary. These poems--ranging from meditative narratives to improvisational lyrics--explore art's capacity to embody as well as express contemporary culture. Stein embraces subjects as various as his father's death, magazine sex surveys, Kandinsky's theory of art, the dangling modifier, Jimi Hendrix's flaming guitar, racial bigotry, and a teacher's comments on a botched poem. Presiding over this miscellany are ghosts of a peculiarly American garden of dreamers and beloved misfits, those redeemed and those left fingering the locked gate.

Chance Ransom

by Kevin Stein

Published 7 July 2000

Winner of Poetry's Frederick Bock Prize and the Indiana Review Poetry Prize, Kevin Stein casts a wide net over the "ineffable befuddlement" of everyday life. His poems render history's chance larder of the consecrated and profane from which we ransom our fate.
Often improvisational and always lyrical, Stein's poems move effortlessly through the art of Beckmann and Degas, the music of Bob Marley and garage bands, and the pathos of cancer patients, factory workers, and victims of bigotry. Insightful and refreshingly unaffected, Chance Ransom explores the shifting shore between self and other with clarity and compassion.
 

Sufficiency of the Actual

by Kevin Stein

Published 26 November 2008

In this ambitious collection, Kevin Stein enters the volatile intersection of private lives and larger public history. In poems variously formal and experimental, improvisational and narrative, wisely silly and playfully forlorn, Stein renders the human carnival flexed across the tattooed bulk of “history’s bicep.”

Musical and refreshingly unaffected, Stein’s poems yoke the domains of high and low art. His poems address subjects by turns surprising, edgy, and humorous. They offer musings on the Slinky and the atomic bomb, elegies for a miscarried pregnancy and the late physicist Edward Teller, reflections on night-shift factory work and President Eisenhower’s golf caddy, and meditations on the politics of post-colonialism and a youthful antiwar streaking incident. Against this vivid backdrop parades a motley cast of American characters seeking wiry balance in a fragile world.