Chronic

“This fourth collection from Powell is simultaneously an accessible heartbreaker, a rare gem for connoisseurs, a genre-altering breakthrough and a long anticipated follow-up.”

“A collection of piquant poetry about heartbreak that mixes mordant wit and sophisticated sincerity in equal measure.”

In these brilliant new poems from one of contemporary poetry’s most intriguing, singular voices, D. A. Powell strikes out for the farther territories of love and comes back from those fields with loss, with flowers faded, “blossom blast and dieback.” Chronic describes the flutter and cruelty of erotic encounter, temptation, and bitter heartsickness, but with Powell’s deep lyric beauty and his own brand of dark wit.

“D. A. Powell's combination of wit and precision make him seem like a post-modern Cavalier poet. The lyric fluency, jittery syntactical invention, and (above all) pathos of his poems are a joy to read, and he has developed a style that is unmistakably his. He is a capacious and exhilarating writer, and CHRONIC is his finest collection yet.”

“Whenever I change the channel to D. A. Powell’s work, there beneath the screen’s headlines runs the simultaneous quicksilver crawl of news from elsewhere: from underneath, behind the scenes, the half-secret places where love is brokered and power is spent. It all races to the heart, and keeps his poems there. Chronic gives us the time of our lives in ways both ardent and exhilarating.”

“Chronic is one of those rare collections that moves beautifully between poetry’s inner / outer stereopticon.”

“Richly romantic yet never sentimental, Powell’s work in Chronic is often addressed to ‘you’: a friend, a lover, and you, the reader. It’s a lovely, intimate style.”

“The chronic illnesses and errors afflicting our planet: can they be healed by a poet? Can they be healed by a poet who suffers from an illness equivalent to the global one? ‘Drug failure or organ failure, cataclysmic climate change….’ This book shows the affliction speaking for itself and this planet doing its best to survive where ‘the yellow violets bloom.’ Other poets ghost the pages (Orpheus, Baudelaire, Donne) with their ancient belief that poetry is a physician. This book makes you believe them.”