Large White House Speaking

$15.00 paper | 68 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-1-936970-19-3
Publication Date: March 2013
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A Green Rose Book

To be human is to yearn (“I study the stars. I arrive and depart”). That’s everywhere evident in this latest from multi-award-winning poet Irwin…In their measured flow, the lines themselves seem to be yearning.
—Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

Large White House Speaking is a book of startling marvels and terrible losses explored in poetry so sharp and bright it is song.  Mark Irwin faces the world and brings it to these pages in strange imagery, high wire lines, with the precision of a surgeon.  He is one of our best poets, and this is his best book yet.
—Laura Kasischke

In this superb collection, Mark Irwin balances precision—each line has been carved into being with consummate care—against an enchanting and tonic strangeness, an adventurous commitment to the depths and reaches of metaphor. Few poets remain as faithful to the imagination where formal mastery always serves its vision. To read the poems here is to feel our lives “luminous and ringing as the space grows larger.” Mark Irwin is a true original, and Large White House Speaking is his best book.
—Peter Campion

Praise for Mark Irwin’s poetry:

Praise for Tall If:

NOTABLE BOOK, 2008
Bloomsbury Review and International Poetry Review

Even as individual lines and phrases achieve a luminous clarity, there remains a brooding circularity to Tall If,in part the apprehension of mortality at mid-life but in part something stranger. “It was a century in which we touched ourselves in mirrors / over and over.”
—G.C. Waldrep, West Branch

Praise for Bright Hunger:

” . . . virtuoso performances . . . an intensity, an urgency about the evanescence of life and the various forces pressing on the human spirit and psyche.”
—Pamela Alexander, FIELD

Mark Irwin

Mark Irwin was born in Faribault, Minnesota, and has taught at Case Western Reserve, the University of Iowa, Ohio University, the University of Denver, the University of Colorado/Boulder, the University of Nevada, and Colorado College. The author of seven collections of poetry, The Halo of Desire  (1987),Against the Meanwhile, Wesleyan University Press (1989), Quick, Now, Always, BOA (1996), White City, BOA (2000), Bright Hunger, BOA (2004), and Tall If, New Issues (2008), he has won The Nation/Discovery Award, four Pushcart Prizes, National Endowment for the Arts and Ohio Art Council Fellowships, two Colorado Council for the Arts Fellowships, two Colorado Book Awards, the James Wright Poetry Award, and fellowships from the Fulbright, Lilly, and Wurlitzer Foundations. He lives in Colorado, and Los Angeles, where he teaches in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at the University of Southern California. www.markirwinauthor.com