Partially Excited States
Charles Hood
Wisconsin Poetry Series
Ronald Wallace, Series Editor
Winner of the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry, selected by Susan Mitchell
Charles Hood shows us a strange and perplexing world that runs on sadness, microbrews, snack cakes, and inexplicable magic. Brimming with natural history and bright flashes of language, his poems focus on transformations. He takes us from Paleolithic caves to modern movie theaters, and along the way we fix time machines with Tom Hanks, enter a Rousseau painting, and collect diamonds from the moons of Neptune.
Charles Hood is a writer of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction, a photographer, and an artist. His many books include Mouth; South x South; Río de Dios: 13 Histories of the Los Angeles River; The Half-Life of Salt: Voices of the Enola Gay; and Red Sky, Red Water: Powell on the Colorado. A longtime animal spotter, he has seen more than six hundred mammal species and more than five thousand species of wild birds. In his global travels, he has trekked to the South Pole, been lost in a Tibetan whiteout, and recovered from bubonic plague.
Author’s Website - https://charleshoodbooks.viewbook.com/
Praise
“Simultaneously dazzling, playful, witty, goofy, hilarious, and profound, Partially Excited States carries us through our past into the present and even into our future somewhere in outer space. This is a mature book that manages to be idiosyncratic in its thinking but universal in its concerns.”
—Susan Mitchell
“These poems give us reality entire, ablaze with fires at once heavenly and infernal. This is a poet whose ecstasy and despair present two sides of the same blade, sharpened on a grim and gorgeous world.”
—Katharine Coles
“Darkly offbeat and witty verse.”
—Library Journal
“Whether wandering through Modern Art Museums, moseying about deserts with some beat poetry tucked under one arm, or sitting down at a National Science Foundation Center in Antarctica, it’s clear that Hood has been soaking in all that he needs to rewire our brains on the fly.”
—Catamaran
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Larger images
March 2017
LC: 2016041566 PS
72 pp. 7 x 9
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