The Coldest Winter on Earth

Poetry. THE COLDEST WINTER ON EARTH is, essentially, a selected poems, with many of the poems comprising a manuscript that was once intended to be a follow up to Lee's visceral, autobiographical book of poems, ABRUPT RURAL. The book mixes those poems with several series of poems written over the last 15 years, including a small selection of improvisational "sonnets," longer poems written loosely in syllabics, prose poems, as well as a group of poems written under the influence of the Alaskan landscape in the summer (time of the midnight sun) of 2011. A few of the poems were written just after the appearance of Lee's first book, Downsides of Fish Culture, in 1997. While others were written for, but finally excluded from, The Nervous Filaments. Some of the poems were written as recently as the summer of 2011. In many ways the book is a throwback to Lee's more austerely narrative style typified by the poems written in the books that came before Lee's SKY BOOTHS IN THE BREATH SOMEWHERE: THE ASHBERY ERASURE POEMS, that is, Downsides of Fish Culture, Arrow Pointing North, and ABRUPT RURAL. THE COLDEST WINTER ON EARTH then, looks back, but it also looks forward to Lee's continued interest in merging form and content, to his restless search for whatever language will best connect him to the world. The poems included here are often comic, hallucinatory, dangerous, and consoling. Whatever the case, THE COLDEST WINTER ON EARTH is an unforgettable reading experience. "Obsessively, elegantly, poignantly, David Dodd Lee immerses himself in the mysterious intercourse of self and place."—Franz Wright "David Dodd Lee's poems just don't work like anyone else's, they're far too possessed by their genius, beautiful, scary, saintly, grotesque—like the nature these poems confront us with again and again."—William Olsen