Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Different Hours by Stephen Dunn Different Hours by Stephen Dunn. Few poets achieve such a plainspoken poignancy as Stephen Dunn. I think of Cavafy, C.K. Williams, Philip Larkin, Horace -- masters of the craft gifted with the knack for discovering scraps of truth within the simplest words. "You might as well be a clown/big silly clothes, no evidence of desire," Dunn suggests in the book's opening poem. This is the language that gets you clawing through the pages to get to the lines that know you, that approve of some private cowardice or failure you wouldn't dare confess even to the closest friend. But there is a kind of trust Dunn builds with the reader here, a wisdom so simple yet complicated enough that you could not quite have put your finger on it as quickly or accurately as he. I mean how his poems know that "as we fall in love/we are already falling out of it." How they resist self- pity in the face of fate: "Because in my family the heart goes first/and hardly anybody makes it out of his fifties/I think I'll stay up late with a few bandits of my choice and resist good advice." It is the sort of statement that gets me flying out of my chair pumping my fist as though I'm cheering on the home team at a high school football game. I am happy for the speaker of these poems the way I was happy for Hulk Hogan as a kid. Dave Smith writes that Dunn may not be correct, but he is never wrong. Smith, himself a phenomenal and overlooked American poet, is exactly right: Dunn's voice is unafraid, skeptical, warm, consoling, bitter, celebratory and -- most of all -- accurate. Books like Different Hours become "tombstones on our lives," as James Merrill says of love. I know that is true of my own experience with it. I was in a Virgin Records, still reeling from an atrocious break-up whose pain refused to leave me. The book collection upstairs was as miserable as I was at the moment; shelves so poorly stacked that it seemed the store was about to do away with selling books altogether. But then a dark and vibrant cover caught my eye; a book by someone named Stephen Dunn whom I had not only never heard of but who also happened to have won the Pulitzer. In the terrible frame of mine I was in that afternoon, I needed nothing more than to listen to what these poems had to say: Those Trotskys of relationships, perpetual revolution their motto, their impatient hearts dangerous to all that's complacent, I understand them perfectly and also why someone they've left behind might travel all the way to Mexico with a pickaxe to put an end to things. Coming across these poems for the first time, it felt as though they were spoken from somewhere inside of me, scratched into my skin; lines that were extended hands strong enough to pull me out of the dark. If angels are not physical presences, then they are actions. They are moments like these in which you hear your name called from a poorly stocked bookshelf in a record store and stumble upon the road that takes you to who you are. Though I am no longer a captive of the bitter junkyard that was my heart at that time, I have never stopped enjoying these poems. I read over Different Hours as well as Dunn's other volumes to this day. Taken as a whole, Dunn's work is one of the most reliable and compassionate friends I have ever had. Stephen Dunn. (born 1939) is an American poet and educator. Dunn has written fifteen collections of poetry. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his 2001 collection, Different Hours and has received an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was born in Forest Hills, Queens. Dunn completed his B.A. in English at Hofstra University and his M.A. in creative writing at Syracuse University. He has taught at Wichita State University, University of Washington, Columbia University, University of Michigan, Princeton University, and at the Richard Stockton College of New Jersey. Dunn had earlier lived in Port Republic, New Jersey, and now spends time at homes in Ocean City, New Jersey, and his wife's hometown of Frostburg, Maryland. Among his other awards are three National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships, Guggenheim Fellowship, and Rockefeller Foundations Fellowship. A collection of essays about Dunn's poetry was published in 2013. Different Hours: Poems. Tuesday New Release Day: Starring MacLaughlin, Gritton, Hamilton, Dunn, and More. Here’s a quick look at some notable books—new titles from the likes of Nina MacLaughlin, JP Gritton, Saskia Hamilton, Stephen Dunn, and more—that are publishing this week. Want to learn more about upcoming titles? Then go read our most recent book preview. Want to help The Millions keep churning out great books coverage? Then sign up to be a member today. Here’s what Publishers Weekly had to say about Wake, Siren: “MacLaughlin, whose debut book was the carpentry memoir Hammerhead, heads in a vastly different direction with this collection of myths recast for the #MeToo era. In more than 30 short stories, nymphs and human women are allowed to tell their own stories, many of which depict gods and heroes as more dangerous than the lascivious and mischievous rogues they’ve often been portrayed as. These settings are largely unmoored from traditional chronology, borrowing freely from both classical tropes and contemporary popular culture, and some—such as one where incestuous Myrrha confesses everything to her therapist, or another in which the cyclops Polyphemus is Galatea’s cyberstalker—are inventive in form. There is nevertheless a certain sameness to many of the stories, perhaps unavoidable in such a project, but MacLaughlin largely succeeds in varying the recurrent themes of sexual violence and women’s subsequent rage and inevitable transformations, largely imposed by gods to ensure women’s silence. The emotional heart of the collection arrives when the horrific story of Proche and Philomela is immediately followed by Baucis’s sensually and emotionally satisfying tale of a long, love-filled marriage. In the latter story, the narrator states that ‘Not all stories are sad,’ a much-needed reminder at this point in the collection. MacLaughlin skillfully elevates what could have been merely a writerly exercise, instead composing a chorus of women’s justifiable rage echoing down through the millennia.” Here’s what Publishers Weekly had to say about The Confession Club: “Berg (The Story of Arthur Truluv) returns to Mason, Mo., for this feel- good testament to taking risks, falling in love, and reinvention. Here, the focus is on the irrepressible members of a monthly club of eight women ranging in age from 20s to 80s, who bare their fibs, sins, and shame. ‘They knew they were mostly silly,’ Berg writes. ‘They enjoyed being silly, because sometimes you just needed to take a load off.’ The heart of this story belongs to cooking school teacher Iris, who’s ‘coming into my fifties,’ divorced and childless when she falls in love with John, 66, a homeless Vietnam vet still haunted by the war and the wife and child he left behind. Berg effortlessly wraps her arms around this busy universe of quirky characters with heartbreaking secrets and unflagging faith. ‘We forget how ready people are to help,’ 47-year-old “stout and practical” club member Toots says, adding: ‘To say those words to yourself or another, ‘I forgive you’? Most powerful words in the world.’ Readers new to Berg’s Mason will be dazzled by this bright and fascinating story, and fans will be cheering for the next volume set there.” Labyrinth by Burhan Sönmez (translated by Umit Hussein) Here’s what Publishers Weekly had to say about Labyrinth: “Sönmez’s latest, following Istanbul, Istanbul, is a cerebral philosophical meditation on memory and what it means to live without it. Boratin Bey is a 28-year-old blues singer living in Istanbul, or at least that is what he has been told. After jumping from the Bosphorus Bridge in an apparent suicide attempt, the musician has experienced complete amnesia: ‘He raises his eyes and looks at his face. The face he met a week ago. It’s that new. Hello stranger, he says.’ His friend and bandmate Bek helps him relearn who he is, or was, answering basic questions such as ‘what sort of person was I, what did I look like?’ Boratin wanders unfamiliar streets, kisses a woman he is told he knows, and attends the funeral of someone who he is told was a friend, Zafir—who, as Boratin describes it, ‘got left behind in the past and disappeared there.’ Indeed, the central question of the novel is if the loss of one’s past is a loss of selfhood or a liberation. As another patient says to him, ‘Maybe you are unfortunate to still be alive and fortunate to have lost your memory.’ Both poetic and an existential novel of ideas, Sönmez’s prose, in Hussein’s translation, is accessible and profound, bringing to mind Albert Camus and Patrick Modiano. While Boratin must learn to find fulfilment with ‘a blank memory,’ this is a book that will undoubtedly linger in a reader’s mind.” Here’s what Publishers Weekly had to say about Wyoming: “In a voice rough as a chainsaw blade and Midwestern as green bean casserole, debut author Gritton chronicles the trip-to-hell-and-back life of the troubled Shelley Cooper.