num_pages: 231
description: Dream worlds, real this book ushers in an extraordinary collection of new work by nearly forty poets currently living and writing in Arizona. From campuses and coffee houses, prisons and pueblos, classrooms and kitchen tables comes the work of both well-known and emerging writers drawn to the state's blazing days and starry nights in search of place, time, idea, and self.Brief introductions for each poet reveal that socially, geographically, and emotionally, they come from anywhere and everywhere. Here and together, however, their energy and synergy are shaping a literary landscape unlike any other. They write of jazz, serotonin levels and talk shows, homelessness, convenience stores and gunplay, Tiananmen Square and Bosnia. Their poems, like these lines by Alberto Ríos, are as clear as the desert "The birds, they make this happen. / In the sky with nothing else to do, a Saturday, / The slow knee-bend of an afternoon, out there. / I have seen them myself / The birds caw down a rain, tease it / To a hard ground of grass and flat and edge."For the anthology, well-known contributors—Ríos, Richard Shelton, Steve Orlen, Alison Deming, and others—were asked to surprise the editors with their ideas for the best less-known artists to include in the volume. Like a kaleidoscope, then, each page brings a shift in tone and color from the one before, from mainstream, "language," and experimental poetry, to that shaped by rural or traditional cultures.In English, Spanish, and Native languages, voices here reach out to those readers whose home—or whose heart—is in Arizona, and to many others who will never travel here. "Each distinct and other," says Forché of the words in Fever Dreams , make of poetry "what it could not be without this place, translating into poetry its timelessness and awe."William AbergAiJed AllenBarbara AndersonJon AndersonMichael BowdenBecky ByrkitCordelia CandelariaJames CervantesDavid ChorltonJeanne E. ClarkJane Candia ColemanMichael CuddihyBarbara CullyAlison Hawthorne DemingNorman DubieBeckian Fritz GoldbergCatherine HammondRex Lee JimRamson LomatewamaRita MagdalenoJane MillerPaul MorrisSheila MurphyRick NoguchiSteve OrlenHenry QuinteroAlberto R¡osWilliam Pitt RootJeannine SavardRichard SheltonJim SimmermanVirginia Chase SuttonLaura ToheTracy TrefethenPeter WildLeilani WrightBrian YoungOfelia Zepeda
language: English
title: Fever Dreams: Contemporary Arizona Poetry
titlecomplete: Fever Dreams: Contemporary Arizona Poetry
genres: Poetry
ratings_count: 3
publisher: University of Arizona Press