Furious Lullaby: Poems by Oliver De La Paz

Furious Lullaby is both a celebration of and a eulogy to the body in the twenty-first century. The collection, which examines the larger concepts of salvation and temptation in a world of blossoming strife, includes a series of aubades – dramatic poems culminating with the separation of lovers at dawn. The lovers suffer a metaphysical crisis, seeking to know what is good, what is evil, and how to truly know the difference. Knowing, however, invites the terrible into their world. The Devil, a seductive trickster, haunts the landscape as a voice who dares each inquisitor to learn about mortality, morality, the beautiful, and the unspeakable through direct experience. Furious Lullaby offers a departure from the lighter prose poetry of de la Paz’s Names above Houses and preserves the author’s concern with the nature of human grace.“ The poems in Furious Lullaby contain as much mischief as they do music, surprising the reader with a chorus of unexpected voices—a scapula, the dead, the Devil—and weaving those moments into a series of heartbreaking aubades that sing to the gorgeous melancholy of memory and loss.”—Rigoberto Gonzalez, author of Other Fugitives and Other Strangers“ These poems have a quiet eroticism, a voice that makes you want to lean in closer. Oliver de la Paz’s seductive lyricism draws us in; we find the beauty of the body, and its desires mark us as creatures of loneliness and mystery. The poems are meant not merely to explore this paradox, but to comfort, to sing in the dark, to do what poems do—find sublimity and timelessness. This is fierce and memorable work.”—Beckian Fritz Goldberg, author of The Book of Accident

About the Author
Oliver de la Paz, an assistant professor of English at Western Washington University, is the author of Names above Houses, published by Southern Illinois University Press, and is a recipient of a grant from the New York Foundation for the Arts. His poems have appeared in the Literary Review, Quarterly West, Third Coast, and Asian Pacific American Review, and in the anthology Tilting the Continent: Southeast Asian American Literature. He received his M.F.A. in creative writing at Arizona State University.

Paperback: 80 pages
Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press; 1st edition (September 25, 2007)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 080932774-0
ISBN-13: 978-08-0-932774-4
Product Dimensions: 6 x 0.4 x 9 inches
Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces