The poems in Paul Nemser's A THOUSAND CURVES find inspiration from nature, travel, mysticism, memory. Time is understood in glimpses-raindrops, tides changing, splashes of a waterfall. Sometimes the background leaps out of the foreground. Bugs grind leaves, a line from a rock song repeats and repeats. Here are ecstasies and nightmares, mysteries and clarities of daily life, fateful steps, chance encounters, donkeys braying, one nightingale calling, reflections off an office building's floor-to-ceiling window. These glimpses can become a poem overnight or take decades to finish. In time the poems come together as a book that moves among traces of these myriad conversations. The internal speaks with the external. Permanence speaks with change. Ultimately the book is about the twists and turns that life takes over a lifetime, the record of a journey with a thousand curves.
Cleary, Eileen: - Editor Eileen Cleary is the author of 'Child ward of the Commonwealth' (2019), which received an honorable mention for the Sheila Margaret Motton Book Prize and ' 2 a.m. with Keats' (Nixes Mate, 2021). In addition, she co-edited the anthology ' Voices Amidst the Virus', the featured text at the 2021 Michigan State University Filmetry Festival and founded and is EIC of Lily Poetry review Books and "Lily Poetry Review." Recent work is included in "Tree Lines: 21st Century American Poetry" (Grayson Books.)
Imber, Jon: - Low Tide, Fifield Point, Pastel on paper, circa 1995
Nemser, Paul: - Paul Nemser grew up in Portland, Oregon, where he fell in love with poetry while reading in the storage room in back of his family's tool store. He received an AB from Harvard College where he studied with Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop, and an MFA in Writing from Columbia University School of the Arts where he studied with Stanley Kunitz and many others. When he asked Kunitz how he could survive as a poet in America, Kunitz gazed up at the sky and, after a long silence, answered, "The Law." Three years later, Nemser attended Boston University School of Law and then practiced law for forty years. His love of poetry has never stopped. Nemser's book Taurus won the 2011 New American Poetry Prize from New American Press. His chapbook Tales of the Tetragrammaton was published by Mayapple Press. A Thousand Curves first appeared in 2021 from Red Mountain Press, where it received the Editor's Choice Award. Nemser's poems appear widely in magazines, including AGNI, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Kenyon Review, London Review of Books, The Missouri Review, and Plume. The UK Poetry Society commissioned a short film of his poem "After the Cal, " which appears on the Society's website. Nemser was a co-translator of two books of Ukrainian poetry: BI Antonych, Square of Angels (Ardis 1977) and I Drach, Orchard Lamps (Sheep Meadow 1978). He lives with his wife Rebecca in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Harborside, Maine.
