Cemeteries and Galaxies - by John Koethe (Paperback)

About the Book

"John Koethe unravels timeless questions of death, math, meaning, and much more in this mesmerizing new collection"--

Book Synopsis

John Koethe unravels timeless questions of death, math, meaning, and much more in this mesmerizing collection.

John Koethe, one of our most philosophically sophisticated poets, has written a book of pithy, contentious, witty poems about our perennial, never-satisfied search for meaning.

The silent mysteries of the stars and the mute beauty of human graves have deep similarities that Koethe probes in these poems with a wondering, wandering gimlet eye that will delight the reader when they don't terrify them.

Cemeteries and Galaxies is an extraordinarily provocative and, perhaps surprisingly, consoling book.

Review Quotes

" This is poetry of reflection and digression and probing -- you feel as if you're sitting on Koethe's back porch with him as the stars come out, having a whiskey and solving the world's problems . . . The wry, melancholy charm is calculated, of course, as any good writer's persona ought to be, but that makes it no less effective. Where poetry is concerned, style is substance." --David Orr, The New York Times

"Its musicality is the inconspicuous polyphony of a mind-that-is-of-two-minds in motion. It's a quiet music, hard to hear, though once you've got its sound in your ear, instantly recognizable . . . . Koethe's words follow the unheard melody of meaning in the making and unmaking. " --Barry Schwabsky, The Point

About the Author

John Koethe has published a dozen books of poetry and has received the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, and the Frank O'Hara Award. He has also published books on Ludwig Wittgenstein, philosophical skepticism, and poetry, as well as the recent essay collection Thought and Poetry. He is Distinguished Professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.