Earthling: Poems - Softcover

James Longenbach is the author of four previous volumes of poetry and six volumes of literary criticism, and his work is often featured in The New Yorker and the Paris Review. He teaches at the University of Rochester and lives in New York.

“[Earthling] opens with several delightful poems that combine plain-spoken language and imaginative vistas as the speaker begins to explore what it means to live on Earth at this time...Literary references and allegorical narratives add to the surprises in this book, which shifts perceptively in each section yet ultimately reminds readers that 'when you love one thing deeply, a/ person, a place/ Ultimately you love them all.'”
- Elizabeth Lund, Washington Post

“Earthling is a gift―wise, aching, unafraid of pleasure and the less-than-pleasurable things that pleasure may commit us to. The whole thing is both grounded and airborne. A wonderful book.”
- Matthew Bevis, Poetry

“Longenbach gives his readers a route to follow, and its turns are precise.”
- The Millions, Must-Read Poetry Pick

“Longenbach's language remains sparse, calm, and graceful even as his poems confront the finiteness of individual human lives.”
- Publishers Weekly

“More than any poet of his generation, Longenbach adventures a cleanly and generous ambition for the art, constantly mindful of his subject as Matter beyond occasion―Matter to be reverenced and thereby understood. In Earthling, he touches upon glory. His ‘Allegory’ is the finest instance of transcendence in American writing since Ammons’s ‘Easter Morning.’ Every page of this collection merits permanence, a pleasure truly modern now.”
- Donald Revell

“Earthling stuns me with its clarities, it fascinates me to no end. Is it Longenbach’s passionate precision? Is it his absolute unmixed attentiveness that’s akin to prayer? To my mind, Earthling is far more than just another brilliant, elegant book of verse: this is elegance at the edge of the abyss. This is a human voice that has come to the middle of life’s desert to find that “In the middle of the desert / you might be anyone.” Longenbach finds here the crystalline, transformative, pure pitch of a lyric poet: his voice in this book becomes any earthling’s voice. How does he do it? How does he give clarity to the human in us? In another century people used to call this effect visionary work: the poetry of a true mystic.”
- Ilya Kaminsky

“James Longenbach knows as much about how poems work as anyone in the world, but he hides this knowledge behind poems that feel so real and artless they hardly seem composed at all. The poems in Earthling are mythological in their simplicity, and their myth is the inevitable one of an isolated consciousness inhabiting places that might or might not be actual, ‘Moments when the artist in each of use created / The material world by finding the unfamiliar in the familiar.’”
- John Koethe