The Sentence - by Morri Creech (Paperback)

About the Book

"With The Sentence, celebrated poet and Pulitzer Prize finalist Morri Creech offers a book-length meditation on mortality. It touches on the sentences we scrawl out in the act of living our daily lives, and on the various sentences to which we find ourselves condemned: loneliness, marital discord, the hardships of work, addiction, and despair. Creech arranges the book around three title poems: one at the beginning of the first section, which announces the author's anxiety about mortality and which turns on the double meaning of the word "sentence"; one at the beginning of section two-roughly the middle of the book-which examines the final days of Russian poet Osip Mandelstam in the transit camp where he died in 1938 (he was, quite literally, sentenced for writing sentences); and one at the end of the book, which meditates on the ability of art and writing to transcend time and recreate lost experience. While essentially formal, the book also includes several prose poems, including two surreal, narrative suites. In all, The Sentence demonstrates complexity in its exploration of its central themes, range in its array of voices and approaches, and variety in its display of forms"--

Book Synopsis

In The Sentence, Morri Creech interrogates our daily lives and experiences to examine the anxieties and despair that often attend our awareness of mortality. Through a variety of subjects, and through styles ranging from rhyme and meter to prose poetry, he takes an unflinching look at what it means to live in the shadow of the end, the common fate to which each of us is sentenced.

Review Quotes

"For Creech's The Sentence, I'd use the word 'stunning.' Creech's control and craft is superb. His use of rhyme, magnificent. Nobody writes formal poetry as well as this. Nobody. I'm lulled and emblazoned at the same time. I love this book. I LOVE this book."--South Florida Poetry Journal

"The Sentence is a book of reflections, refractions, raveling, and ramifications with breathtaking branchings of syntax, sonic permutations, and Frostian forks foreclosing other lives."--Dora Malech

"The Sentence is Creech's best book to date, its feats of imagination his most sweeping and its reckonings his most clear-eyed."--David Yezzi

"All poets start out as artists, a blessed few eventually become craftspeople, too. Morri Creech is a craftsperson as well as an artist, and the poems in The Sentence are uncommonly well-made things."--Shane McCrae

"Rich with sound and imagination, these masterful poems teach us to pay attention to not just the matter of our lives but the music of our lives."--Ada Limón

"Somehow, remarkably, this collection seems both more impersonal and more personal than Creech's earlier work, more wide-ranging in its expression of common experience yet even more deeply felt, sentence by artful sentence."--Joseph Harrison

About the Author

Morri Creech is the author of four collections of poetry, including The Sleep of Reason, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and Blue Rooms. He teaches creative writing in the undergraduate and MFA programs at Queens University of Charlotte in North Carolina.