Blue Guide

Inspired by the miraculously mercurial potential of words, Stephen Yenser takes readers on a heady trip through a world full of promise yet compromised by human weakness. Set in sunny southern California and Greece, the poems of Blue Guide cast the shadow of mortality, and the tones are elegiac. This combination of the deadly serious and the exuberant is natural, Yenser notes; after all, work and orgy share the same etymological root, as do travail and travel, pledge and play. 
 

Using various poetic modes, Yenser offers here a quatrain written to name a painting by Dorothea Tanning; a sequence of poems for his daughter; an excursive poem at once about Los Angeles and Baghdad and his father and a petty criminal; a group of prose poems set in penumbral bars; some postcards to a dead friend; and a meditation prompted by a sojourn on a remote Aegean island.  The most unexpected work is an assemblage of quotations and glosses in the tradition of the commonplace book, except that in Yenser's hands these entries are densely interrelated.

Praise for Stephen Yenser:
“Yenser is a justly celebrated critic [of Robert Lowell and James Merrill among others]. . . . Yenser sees thae beauty that can arise from an intelligent playfulness . . . . Above all, Yenser has learned Merrill’s Freudian lesson—how quickly playfulness leads to the most uncomfortable, central, yet elusive psychic content.”—Alan Williamson, American Poetry Review