From the winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the Ruth Lilly Prize

Carl Dennis has become one of the most important American poets writing today. Unknown Friends, his tenth book, is about separation and connection, about actual friends we can never know fully and friends never met who are summoned into existence through the efforts of an imagination that insists on dialogue. While accepting our ignorance as inevitable, the poems work to expand the notion of what it means to be part of a community larger than any we can comprehend, both a community given to us by history and one outside of history through which the world of experience is nurtured and sustained.

Carl Dennis is a poet who has valuable things to say—about faith (or its absence) in the modern world, fear, and regret—in ways that are personal and universal at the same time. . . . Dennis constantly surprises. (Joseph Parisi)
© Mary Richert
Carl Dennis is the author of 13 previous works of poetry, as well as a collection of essays, Poetry as Persuasion. In 2000 he received the Ruth Lilly Prize for his contribution to American poetry. His 2001 collection Practical Gods won the Pulitzer Prize. He lives in Buffalo, New York. View titles by Carl Dennis

About

From the winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the Ruth Lilly Prize

Carl Dennis has become one of the most important American poets writing today. Unknown Friends, his tenth book, is about separation and connection, about actual friends we can never know fully and friends never met who are summoned into existence through the efforts of an imagination that insists on dialogue. While accepting our ignorance as inevitable, the poems work to expand the notion of what it means to be part of a community larger than any we can comprehend, both a community given to us by history and one outside of history through which the world of experience is nurtured and sustained.

Reviews

Carl Dennis is a poet who has valuable things to say—about faith (or its absence) in the modern world, fear, and regret—in ways that are personal and universal at the same time. . . . Dennis constantly surprises. (Joseph Parisi)

Author

© Mary Richert
Carl Dennis is the author of 13 previous works of poetry, as well as a collection of essays, Poetry as Persuasion. In 2000 he received the Ruth Lilly Prize for his contribution to American poetry. His 2001 collection Practical Gods won the Pulitzer Prize. He lives in Buffalo, New York. View titles by Carl Dennis