A MacArthur recipient’s first collection of poetry embraces mortality and survival in the face of global conflict and domestic threat.
Godspotting ponders and proclaims what it means to live, die, and survive in a world that “doesn’t love any of us.” Considering the fragility and utterly complicated nature of life, Aleksandar Hemon’s deep contemplation of human mortality shifts between surrendering to the disappearing act of death and accepting that this cruel world is still home to beautiful things. Hemon acknowledges the difficulty of living in the present as he interrogates the “shape and form” of joy, meandering through tender and complex memories of family members, his childhood and youth, and valued moments that must end. This collection challenges typically religious understandings of death and what follows, as it teeters from curiosity to radical acceptance to despair at one’s inevitable demise.
ISBN: 9781556597404
Format: Paperback
Reviews
Praise for Aleksandar Hemon
“Possessed of a phenomenal gift for translating feelings into concrete imagery in masterfully structured tales that end in stunning crescendos, Hemon infuses everything, from a freezer to bees in a hive, with barbed insights into our instinct for aggression, longing for connection, and unquenchable need to tell our stories, whether in poems, letters, drunken orations, or confessions to strangers. Hemon is a world-class writer of seismic depth, riptide humor, wine-dark language, and unflinching candor.”—Donna Seaman, Booklist
“Hemon is immensely talented-a natural storyteller and a poet, a maker of amazing, gorgeous sentences in what is his second language.”—Los Angeles Times Book Review
“Hemon displays a considerable command of sudden shifts in tone, shuttling swiftly but surely between black comedy and bleak reality.”—Kirkus Reviews
“A charmingly discombobulated take on life and language. . . . Hemon makes ordinary occurrences read like psychic disturbances.”—Village Voice
“You may feel nearly giddy with pleasure at how beautifully written, funny, and entertaining [these stories] are, and at the depths of tenderness and seriousness swirling beneath their wry, deceptively offhand surface.”—Francine Prose, O, the Oprah Magazine
“His books are replete with the kind of memorable phrases that reviewers cherry-pick and offer to the reader. Here is an assortment from his new novel: a cat purring is ‘revving his little pleasure engine’; a character presses ‘his face against the window in the parenthesis of his hands’; elsewhere, ‘leafless tree crowns scrambled the early morning light.'”—Marcel Theroux, Guardian