David Keplinger is a poet and translator. His collections of poems include The Most Natural Thing, The Prayers of Others, The Clearing, and The Rose Inside and, most recently, Another City. His translations include Carsten René Nielsen’s World Cut Out with Crooked Scissors and House Inspections, a Lannan Translations Selection; his most recent translation is Jan Wagner’s The Art of Topiary. Keplinger’s work has appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review, American Poetry Review, and The Writer’s Almanac, and has been translated and included in anthologies in China, Germany, Denmark, Northern Ireland, and elsewhere. The recipient of two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Keplinger has received support from the Soros Foundation, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the D.C. Council on Arts and Humanities, and the Danish Council on the Arts. He has also received the T.S. Eliot Award, the Colorado Book Award, the Cavafy Prize from Poetry International and The Erksine Poetry Prize from Smartish Place. Keplinger directs the MFA program at American University in Washington, DC.
This collection deftly spans not only the physical space of global cities, but more intangible and intimate distances: between birth and death, father and son, past and present, metaphor and reality. From experiences defined by an urban landscape to the streets themselves, in these poems startling images collide and mingle like bodies on a busy thoroughfare.
One of the most important contemporary poets working in German makes his American debut in this compact, light-footed, and curious dual-language collection. These poems, crafted with the care of a master gardener tending his topiary, seem to gleam and shiver with their own life.
