Brass Knuckles

The poems in this powerful first book have grown from the American urban experience of the last half of this century, a time of decay and diminishing possibilities; they vary from realistic vignettes of working-class Chicago neighborhoods to prose poems elegant and spare in their surrealism. At the middle of this book and at the thematic center of the collection is Dybek’s remarkable reworking of the myth of Persephone, in which the American goddess learns to prefer the underworld and has fallen in love with Death.

Brass Knuckles, STUART DYBEK’s first collection of poems, was first published in 1979. A second collection, Streets in Their Own Ink, appeared in 2004 from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Dybek is the author of three books of fiction, Childhood and Other Neighborhoods, The Coast of Chicago, and most recently, a novel-in-stories, I Sailed With Magellan (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). His fiction, poetry, and nonfiction have been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, DoubleTake, Poetry, and other magazines. Dybek is Professor of English at Western Michigan University and a member of the permanent faculty for the Prague Summer Writers Seminars. He lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan.