An essential collection of James Tate’s extraordinary poems that will captivate today’s readers, with a foreword by Terrance Hayes
Celebrating James Tate’s work as it transcends convention, time, and everything that tells us, “No, you can’t do that,” Hell, I Love Everybody gives us the poet at his best, his most intimate, hopeful, inventive, and brilliant. John Ashbery called Tate the “poet of possibilities,” and this collection records forays into possibilities for American poetry’s future. With a foreword by Terrance Hayes, it is sure to give readers new and old a lasting collection of favorites.
Enter a world where the mundane and the mythic collide—often with hilarious and heartbreaking results.
- Surrealist Poetry: Meet an extraterrestrial who just wants to see a real cowboy, a policeman with a goat named the Prince of Peace, and a dog who keeps coming back from the dead.
- Absurdist Humor: Discover a candy store where stickups are against the rules, a man who can’t get his couch through a restaurant door, and the proper way to choose a new Pope (it involves a 7-Eleven).
- Deadpan Voice: Tate’s signature conversational, matter-of-fact style makes even the most bizarre events feel strangely, movingly familiar.
- The Poet of Possibilities: A collection that showcases why John Ashbery called him a master of invention, creating worlds where anything can, and frequently does, happen.
