Days Like Prose - Softcover

Alan Michael Parker is a novelist, poet, essayist, and cultural critic. He has written and lectured widely (including at the Sorbonne and on the Menominee reservation in Wisconsin) on subjects ranging from the history of beach house art to casinos that sell Matisse paintings. The author or editor of seventeen books, including Whale Man, The Ladder, and Christmas in July, he has received numerous awards, including three Pushcart Prizes, two inclusions in Best American Poetry, the North Carolina Book Award, two Randall Jarrell Poetry prizes, the Fineline Award, the Brockman-Campbell Award, and the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. His poems have appeared in Antaeus, Boulevard, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, TriQuarterly, and many other journals. He is Douglas C. Houchens Professor of English at Davidson College, and he also teaches in the low-residency M.F.A. program at the University of Tampa.

"With a delicate lucidity, the poems in this first collection explore varieties of solitude. . . . The deft, formal quality of these poems coupled with Parker's eye for the telling detail make this a book of stirring, quiet beauty." --Publishers Weekly (Copyright 1997 Cahners Business Information, Inc.)

"With Days Like Prose, Parker has written a poetry of living music and sonic complexities, whose textures modulate from the circumspect to the resplendent. Whether meditating on the Sears catalogue or narrating a widow's recent grief, these poems intimate rather than explicate; they bespeak the reticence in the folds of the world." --Alice Fulton

"In this marvelous debut collection we discover an eloquence so humble that at first we may not recognize its profound and sometimes dazzling elegance. These are poems in which the formal intelligence often touches true wisdom. Days Like Prose is a masterful accomplishment." --David St. John