Downsides of Fish Culture
$12.00 paper | $22.00 cloth
ISBN-13: 978-0-932826-55-8 (paper)
ISBN-13: 978-0-932826-54-1 (cloth)
Publication Date: September, 1997
63 Pages | Foreword by Charles D’Ambrosio
Buy: Amazon.com | B&N | IndieBound
ShopWMU Chicago Distribution Center
“Nowhere in recent American writing have I found such a marvelous evocation of a generation, the first to be so at home with halfness and failure, to accept the end as the raw material of life.”
—Charles D’Ambrosio, from the foreword
“Like the natural world David Dodd Lee knows from the inside, a firsthand knowledge, his poems are comprised of grace and violence in equal parts, mesmerizing and inescapable rhythms, and dark but brightly lit imagery — compelling poems sprung from the dark heart of American poetry.”
—Rick Lyon
“Lee reminds us that the richest act of imagination is — above all else — an act of empathy. Both the sadness and exhilaration in this poet’s heart of hearts — the living poem itself — become the reader’s too. This refreshingly original debut collection is full of fragile human atoms on the loose somewhere between versions of terror and sheer delight. We come to count on this poet’s stubborn insistence: in the war against despair, the spoils of comfort and sustenance must be re-invented, again and again, on our dizzying everyday walks through the world.”
—David Clewell
“In the poems of David Lee, the world of nature, impassioned, brutal, swift, is not just out there in the Michigan drifts — it is in here, in us. How powerfully we are made to know this, beyond mere hope or reckless sorrow, is what I find most stunning — and most frightening — about his poems. This is a poetry so alive as to be almost ready to blow its seams — and would, but that it is governed decisively by craft and intelligence. Instead, I hold on, as we must, for dear life.”
—Nancy Eimers
David Dodd Lee
David Dodd Lee’s recent poems have appeared in Blackbird,Hayden’s Ferry Review, Pool,Denver Quarterly, Slope,
Pleiades, Laurel Review, Nerve, and Massachusett’s Review. He is the editor of the annual poetry and fiction anthology, SHADE, published by Four Way Books. Lee is also the publisher of Half Moon Bay poetry chapbooks, which include titles by Franz Wright and Hugh Seidman. In the past he has served as poetry editor at Third Coast andPassages North. He has worked as a park ranger, a fisheries technician, and a journalist. He received the MFA degree in 1993, after taking a BFA in painting and Art History in the eighties. He teaches creative writing at Indiana University South Bend.
New Issues Poetry & Prose 