Praise for A Mnemonic for Desire
"What I love most about this book is the voice that animates so many of the poems. I trust it immediately, this mix of worldliness and amazement. [Mueske's] is a voice that knows what it means to be beaten down, but also what it means to rise up. By the last section, the poems have become hymns to intimacy, beautifully sung, believable, and necessary."
—JIM MOORE, author of Lightning at Dinner (Graywolf Press)
"In one of these poems, Steve Mueske speaks of bats settling at dusk in "a sympathetic world built / from the echoes of the given." He might equally be speaking of the world offered in these poems — also a sympathetic world, filled with echoes of the givens of home and of nature, but spiraling away into an imaginative place, full of surprises. The poems glitter with supple and original images, grounded always in sturdy, muscular language ... each poem searches for, and finds, the form in which its music and vision can work together for the reader's delight."
—JUDITH BARRINGTON, author of Horses and the Human Soul (Storyline Press)
"Steve Mueske's reality presses in from all sides, from the natural world to the surreal, from the woods and fields to the twilit city. Check out the black and yellow spider. Check out the 44th Street Avatar. This voice celebrates dream and music, it celebrates being alive."
—JOSEPH MILLAR, author of Overtime (Eastern Washington University Press)
"I don't recall a first book so abundundant with wild and compelling self portraits, so remarkable in its variety of places, times, emotional currencies, or this riveting as we watch the narrator seek and find the holiness in a life honorably lived and imagined. People who love what poetry can mean and be will gravitate to A Mnemonic for Desire. The rewards that come from deep reading and deep feeling flow from this book."
—DEBORAH KEENAN, author of Good Heart (Milkweed Editions)
Also Available: Whatever the Story Requires (2004, limited-edition chapbook). E-mail for inquiries.
"What I love most about this book is the voice that animates so many of the poems. I trust it immediately, this mix of worldliness and amazement. [Mueske's] is a voice that knows what it means to be beaten down, but also what it means to rise up. By the last section, the poems have become hymns to intimacy, beautifully sung, believable, and necessary."
—JIM MOORE, author of Lightning at Dinner (Graywolf Press)
"In one of these poems, Steve Mueske speaks of bats settling at dusk in "a sympathetic world built / from the echoes of the given." He might equally be speaking of the world offered in these poems — also a sympathetic world, filled with echoes of the givens of home and of nature, but spiraling away into an imaginative place, full of surprises. The poems glitter with supple and original images, grounded always in sturdy, muscular language ... each poem searches for, and finds, the form in which its music and vision can work together for the reader's delight."
—JUDITH BARRINGTON, author of Horses and the Human Soul (Storyline Press)
"Steve Mueske's reality presses in from all sides, from the natural world to the surreal, from the woods and fields to the twilit city. Check out the black and yellow spider. Check out the 44th Street Avatar. This voice celebrates dream and music, it celebrates being alive."
—JOSEPH MILLAR, author of Overtime (Eastern Washington University Press)
"I don't recall a first book so abundundant with wild and compelling self portraits, so remarkable in its variety of places, times, emotional currencies, or this riveting as we watch the narrator seek and find the holiness in a life honorably lived and imagined. People who love what poetry can mean and be will gravitate to A Mnemonic for Desire. The rewards that come from deep reading and deep feeling flow from this book."
—DEBORAH KEENAN, author of Good Heart (Milkweed Editions)
Also Available: Whatever the Story Requires (2004, limited-edition chapbook). E-mail for inquiries.
