Long Division (Tupelo Masters) - Softcover

In addition to his seven books of poems, Alan Michael Parker has published two novels and served as editor of the anthology, THE IMAGINARY POETS (Tupelo Press, 2005). His poems and prose have appeared in The Believer, The New Republic, The New York Times Book Review, Paris Review, Salon, The San Francisco Chronicle, Slate and elsewhere. He has received the Pushcart Prize, the Fineline Prize from The Mid-American Review and the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, among other awards. He teaches writing and literature at Davidson College and in the Queens University low-residency M.F.A. program. He lives in Davidson, North Carolina, with the artist Felicia van Bork. His most recent poetry collection is LONG DIVISION (Tupelo Press, 2012).

"Alan Michael Parker possesses a mind completely unlike any poet at work in America today, finding in the clutter around us not just sources of sadness, wit, and playful irony--but also profound ambivalence about a world in which our past is not recoverable, in which the work of the mind upon the landscape is the true source of meaning, in which we all inhabit 'the arc of Story graphed upon the axes of Love and Death.' I have long considered Parker to be one of the most brilliant poets at work in America today. Long Division, his best book yet, confirms that." -- Kevin Prufer

"Alan Michael Parker, in style and in stance ('Sadness remains my politics,' he writes), demonstrates that wit and irony have much more to offer us than we've known. In one masterful poem after another composed with luminous attention to the poetic line, Parker conducts the long divisions toward reconciliation between contentment and the necessity of asking more from ourselves, each other, and the world. He assures us our redemption, but proves that it requires the cunning and exuberance only a poet of his talent can muster for the rest of us. I feel blessed by these poems in Long Division, the work of a poetic troubleshooter intent on spreading grace on everything before him." -- Khaled Mattawa --Advance Praise