Dreaming Man, Face Down

Mark Conway is offering us a long letter to the dead, an appeal for a connection beyond the grave ("The Romans had a way / to talk to the dead: bring them / a bowl of blood . . ."). In poem after remarkable poem, Conway -at once sublime and profane-conjures, resurrects, cajoles, addresses, pleads with, and finally accepts, a lost (or imagined?) brother; heaven is invoked, redemption sought and rejected. We are all lost, these poems remind us, and yet "How beautiful was the city of the living this afternoon . . ." - Nick Flynn Reading these poems, I hear the clatter of my own footsteps through cities of hieroglyphs and pinball machines-a paradise run-through with ghosts, whom Conway conjures with grit and grace. Dreaming Man, Face Down hits me in the head and heart with image after stunning image, and the hard true language of love and regret. - Tracy K. Smith Someone dies - it's an anti-miracle. He was here and now he is gone. How is this possible? Deep, persistent and comic too, Mark Conway wrestles with the phenomenal entity of absence without giving an inch. - Fanny Howe These poems are electric with indignation and holy rage and love for the "hyper-beauty" of what and who is doomed to die: everything we know and every one. Oh Lord, read this book. It made me laugh out loud and put my head in my hands. It made me look out the window and be glad. - Marie Howe About the Author: Mark Conway is the author of Any Holy City which won the Gerald Cable Book Award and was short-listed for the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry. His work has appeared in The Paris Review, Slate, American Poetry Review and Ploughshares. He lives in Avon Minnesota and directs the Literary Arts Institute at the College of Saint Benedict.