Christina Pugh's fifth book of poems explores the technologies both ancient and new that inhabit our contemporary cultural moment. Mapping an uncanny journey through the clusters of media we encounter daily but seldom stop to contemplate, Pugh's focused descriptions, contrasting linguistic textures, and acute poetic music become multifarious sources of beauty, disruption, humor, and hurt. Here, Netflix and YouTube share space with eighteenth-century paintings, Italian graffiti, ballet, Kurt Cobain's recordings, and even a collection of rocks. Whether technology is a vessel for joy or grief in these poems, it is always an expression of our continuing desire to invent and to mediate. At once personal archive and cultural barometer, Stardust Media traces the moving constellations of life in the distant twenty-first century, "a kaleidoscope / . . . half-filled with sky-blue glass-cut blossoming, / then labored to crystallize."
Pugh wants to gather up and sift through all she can manage just a little ways into the twenty-first century. It's a mammoth job and she knows it, she treats it with delicate respect and a whole lot of thoughtful arrangement. Nothing is only one thing, anything can be everything. Stardust Media makes for a wild ride and a good one.'—Dara Wier, Juniper Prize for Poetry judge and author of You Good Thing
'Christina Pugh's Stardust Media goes right to the heart of how we live now: What particular human qualities does our technological civilization enliven or deaden inside us? What really astonishes and fortifies the reader are the endlessly inventive ways the poet has found to figure and refigure her own restless vision. Quiet virtuosity, complexly registered thinking-as-feeling—these are her signature qualities as a poet, as original as she is intelligent.'—Tom Sleigh, author of House of Fact, House of Ruin: Poems
'The poems in Stardust Media are major works by a major poet. Their virtuoso technique enlivens the reader's sense of just how complex and rich the world may be, even as the poems strive toward their fundamental, bedrock motive—to preserve and transmit the imprint of the human.'—Kenyon Review
CHRISTINA PUGH is professor of English in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago and consulting editor for Poetry. Her fourth book, Perception, was named one of the top poetry books of 2017 by the Chicago Review of Books, and she has been awarded the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship in poetry and the Poetry Society of America's Lucille Medwick Memorial Award for her work. Pugh's poems have appeared widely in such outlets as the Atlantic, Poetry, the Kenyon Review, and Colorado Review.
