Riffs and Reciprocities

the long version

Recently, turning from poetry to prose, Stephen Dunn, acclaimed as one of the strongest poets of his generation, began to experiment with short, related prose pieces that played off each other in the manner of jazz improvisations. "I was interested in the tangentially related, each piece a discrete paragraph, sometimes an act of definition or redefinition, sometimes a description, occasionally a story.". Throughout, Dunn takes a personal ownership of words that the dictionary merely defines objectively. The wisdom and startling verbal turns we've come to expect from his poetry are everywhere in the ninety miniatures (forty-five pairs) that compose this volume. There may be debts to Ponge and Calvino here, but Stephen Dunn has made prose pairs a fascinating genre of his own.