Tomorrow's Living Room
76 pages, 5 1/2 x 8 1/2
Paperback
Release Date:01 Sep 2009
ISBN:9780874217476
Volume 13 in the Swenson Award Series, Tomorrow's Living Room offers a pleasantly disorienting verbal territory. The collection is alternately wry and dark, hopeful and bleak, full of unexpected light and laugh-out-loud incongruities. We begin to see that the shape and the furniture of Jason Whitmarsh's world reflect our own (they may in fact be universal), but we're considering them through completely new terms of engagement.
Selected by, and with a foreword by, Billy Collins.
The annual Swenson competition, named for May Swenson, honors her as one of America’s most provocative and vital writers. In John Hollander’s words, she was "one of our few unquestionably major poets."
With so many poets working the American idiom these days, it is a wonder to find one with an original voice, but Jason Whitmarsh has carved out a verbal territory for himself unlike anyone else's. It is the kind of voice that whistles for our attention. —Billy Collins
Jason Whitmarsh received a B.A. in mathematics from the University of Chicago and an M.F.A. in poetry from the University of Washington. His poems have appeared in a number of journals, including American Letters & Commentary, Denver Quarterly, Fence, The Harvard Review, New American Writing, Ploughshares, Verse, and The Yale Review. He lives in Seattle with his wife and children. Tomorrow’s Living Room is his first book.
