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Award winning, widely anthologized poet, novelist, and short story writer, Ira Sadoff has published six collections of poetry, including Emotional Traffic and Palm Reading In Winter. He has also published a novel, Uncoupling, and The Ira Sadoff Reader, a collection of stories, poems, and essays. His poems have appeared in most major literary magazines, including The New Yorker, The American Poetry, The Paris Review, The Nation, The New Republic, Esquire, Antaeus, The Hudson Review, and The Partisan Review. Poems in Grazing have been awarded the Leonard Shestack Prize, the Pushcart Poetry Prize, and the George Bogin Memorial Prize from the Poetry Society of America. He has taught at the University of Virginia, the Iowa Writers Workshop, and currently teaches at Colby College. |
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"How heartening to find an already accomplished poet inventing a new voice, with a new richness of experience and insight, and a denser, more
intricate music. Reality itself, the reality of the world, and of the soul, seem
intensified and renewed in "Some of Ira Sadoff's poems are nothing less than masterpieces....He belongs in every major anthology,every library.It's a joy not to have to exaggerate when I say that nowhere else in American poetry do I come across a passion, a cunning, and a joy greater than his. And a deadly accuracy.I see him as one of the supreme poets of his generation, coming of age as he--and they--did in the mid-sixties;and I see him as part of a line of trusted singers--James Wright,for one,Bobbie Burns for one, we almost couldn't survive without.Talk about treasures!" --Gerald Stern "The sweat and rage and tenderness of our intrinsic ignorance seethe behind the shipwrecked seizing on pieces of the world to make sense of it in so many brilliant ways, to move it to another plane of understanding. ... An impersonal, archetypal force inspires this voice and gives it a dimension of vision beyond recognizable reality: it's the new tone and rhythm of a man on the verge of reconciliating some unformulated, agonize, ecstatic rift in the soul. Call it "eye music" as Sadoff does in the title poem, but that merely points to the rare accomplishment and value of Grazing." --Stephen Berg, editor APR "Beyond the energetic syntax and the astonishing range of idiom and tone, what I so admire about these poems is the just yet always unpredictable weaving together of individual and collective life, the insightful, almost seamless integration of personal experience in all its unredemptive anguish with the heterogeneous realities of American culture." -- Alan Shapiro, Judge, George Bogin Memorial Award, Poetry Society of America "Celebration abounds but never gives way to sentimentalism in this sixth volume of poetry by veteran author Ira Sadoff. Often spare in his descriptions, Sadoff allows objects and observations to suggest their stories rather than overstate them. In many of the poems, a whimsical but wise voice presides, especially in 'An Improbable Delirium,' where a speaker slyly ruminates: 'Something tells me it's the job of poetry/ to bring some wretched character out on stage,/ to gesture wildly, giving a soliloquy....'"--Carolyn Alessio, CHICAGO TRIBUNE
Praise for earlier work: "If Sadoff possesses an enviable visual sense, he also has a marvelous ear; there are passages in these poems that should be heard as well as seen." --Joel Conarroe, Washington Post Book World | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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