Highlighting a curated journey through Aaron Anstett's poetic evolution, this collection features selections from six prior works alongside twenty-seven new poems. Anstett's writing is characterized by a keen attention to detail and a lyrical quality, showcasing his talent for surprise, wit, and wonder. The compilation serves as a testament to his growth and exploration in the realm of poetry, inviting readers to experience the depth and breadth of his creative voice.
The collection showcases Aaron Anstett's signature blend of beauty and wit, infused with a profound sense of sorrow. Notably, it introduces a fragility that reflects a "late-stage" freedom, highlighting themes of incompleteness and the struggle to grasp fleeting moments. The poems balance polished humor with deep emotional resonance, inviting readers to explore the complexities of existence and the acceptance of what cannot be held.
Set in a future where intelligent roaches reflect on the absurdities and tragedies of the Anthropocene era, the collection captures the emotional landscape of Donald Trump's America. Aaron Anstett's crystalline poems distill the complex feelings of dismay, grief, and irony, offering a profound commentary on our current predicament. Through sharp and evocative language, the work invites readers to confront the overwhelming challenges of contemporary life with both seriousness and a touch of absurdity.
Poetry. The poems in Aaron Anstett's MOREOVER, by turns laconic and garrulous, hard-boiled and tender, magnify gaps and unreliabilities in the surface of things through which the depths of an underlying desolation, a nameless existential care, and the mystery of love may be glimpsed; they make a swaying bridge over the abyss of loss. "Number among my umpteen flaws detached glibness," he writes; "Who would disagree that little's glitchless?" What he calls his glibness, transmitted with a compressed but graceful musicality, often attains an unsentimental lyricism all the more touching for its reticence. His audacious imagination and relentless intelligence give rise to a richly ironic humor that is often valedictory, somber, even grim, but never without profound affection and attention. "What makes Aaron Anstett's poems unforgettable? Is it the last known photograph of Robert Desnos, in Theresienstadt, 1945? A pigeon feather on pavement? A speaker who asks, 'Who's most dumbstruck anything exists?' No to all of those, I'd say, for what this poet gives us are not just things and their tragedies but moments in which to witness our own gestures toward life, the acts of willed and failed attention that constitute hope--a hope both breathtaking and fleeting, as the poems unfurl line by line, in a syntax built to mend, then break, then mend again, your heart."--Susan Tichy