The Rose of January

By Geoffrey Nutter

• Description
• Reviews
• Bio

• In his fourth collection, Geoffrey Nutter beckons us into his lush imagination—where bygone monoliths cast shadows over new landscapes—a world of dreams, rife with unexpected encounters. The Rose of January reveals the craftsmanship of a poet well acquainted with many vocabularies, one who grants us access to a realm beyond the bounds of our own imaginative sufficiency.
  
  

• Nutter’s new volume ends up at once whimsical and tragic, a rich set of hues and a series of shadowy corners, whose allusive poems become places in which we hope to get lost.
  Publishers Weekly
  

  Like Italo Calvino meets Wallace Stevens meets William Gass with a dash of Kafka tossed in, Nutter’s writing has one foot planted firmly in reality and the other in the fantastical world of the poet’s imagination.
  Gwarlingo
  
  Nutter is staging a poetic dialogue where poetry searches for its place between fancy and cultural relevance...in the sense that a speaker guides his reader through an excited (if not ecstatic), fanciful discovery, then both speaker and reader are empowered (or at least delighted) by the discovery, and then that discovery occupies a part of the cultured life accrued by the reader.
  Kent Shaw, The Rumpus
  
  The appeal of Nutter’s poems lies in their freedom to reach back and forth through time, snatching one exotic word after another, not so much to construct arguments, but to delight.
  John Ebersole, Coldfront
  
  Whatever’s smuggled into these poems—the Petronas Towers, Afghanistan cliffs, Lugers and New Jersey—obeys the abstract logic at the heart of descriptive writing: the sweet ease of writing’s intangibility, its virtual tease.
  Adam Fitzgerald, The American Reader

   

• 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.