Cities at Dawn

By Geoffrey Nutter

• Description
• Reviews
• Bio

• Lush, surreal, cinematic, and imagistically precise, Geoffrey Nutter paints the world into his fifth collection of poems. His poems display a consciousness in awe of all matter, be it organic, mechanical, industrial, ornithological, or sartorial. Iridescent and sparkling, his poems are ornate wonders of language, each their own contained ecosystem and civilization.
  
  

• Nutter’s poetry, time and time again, reminds us of our slow divorce from objective reality whose physical resistance to human desire we have always relied upon for proper development. If his poetry infuriates us (and it can; it does), it’s not so much due to its confection but because it relentlessly shows us a world we never really got to know, that makes his poetry so sweet. His poems are full of things that proudly stand distinct from us (e.g., a freight car, maps, statues, steel domes, cigars, steeples, and on and on) as if to remind us that our reply to nature was once to negotiate with it, imagine into it, not replace it. . . . For years now, Nutter has been quietly writing some of the most beautiful poems in America.
  John Ebersole, Kenyon Review

  Though its tone is almost always calmly descriptive, whatever it describes is always somehow something else and not itself.
  Barry Schwabsky, Hyperallergic

  In audacious lushness, Geoffrey Nutter's Cities at Dawn delivers layers upon layers of detail that are refreshing in the face of contemporary poetic trends.
  Natalie Tomlin, Newpages

  These poems are the multi-angled jewels whose light is derived from the fragments Nutter calls out directly.
  Greg Bem, Yellow Rabbits

   

• Geoffrey Nutter is the author of A Summer Evening (winner of the 2001 Colorado Prize), Water’s Leaves & Other Poems (Winner of the 2004 Verse Press Prize), Christopher Sunset (winner of the 2011 Sheila Motton Book Award), The Rose of January (Wave Books, 2013), and Cities at Dawn (Wave Books, 2016), and Giant Moth Perishes (Wave Books, 2021). He recently traveled in China, giving lectures, workshops, and readings as a participant in the Sun Yat-sen University Writers’ Residency. Geoffrey’s poems have been translated into Spanish, French, and Mandarin. Soir d’été, a bilingual edition of his poems translated into French by poets Molly Lou Freeman and Julien Marcland, was recently published in France, and a German translation of his book Water’s Leaves & Other Poems will appear in 2021. He has taught poetry at Princeton, Columbia, University of Iowa, NYU, the New School, and 92nd Street Y. He currently teaches Greek and Latin Classics at Queens College. He runs the Wallson Glass Poetry Seminars in New York City.