An Incomplete Encyclopedia of Happiness and Unhappiness: Poems (Paperback)
Staff Reviews
The mythological meets the biblical meets the formal in these brutal and beautiful poems. Thank you Amy Newman for restoring my faith in contemporary poetry!!
— From Mia's PicksAn Incomplete Encyclopedia of Happiness and Unhappiness catalogs our daily disappointments and our nighty dreams of perfection.
An Incomplete Encyclopedia of Happiness and Unhappiness catalogs our daily disappointments and our nighty dreams of perfection. Entry by entry, in poems that shift under the weight of their formal properties, Amy Newman describes a physical world stuffed with maddening beauty, trifling joys, and the sense that all of it might come to nothing, but what a spectacular nothing that is. These poems narrate the comings and goings in the natural world where animals and people move silently, warily, some by instinct, others by faith, all of us burdened yet somehow redeemed by the perfect imperfections around us. Unfinished, Newman’s encyclopedia hasn’t yet exhausted the knowledge of existing in a world that’s both violent and beautiful. Yet it continues to try.
Amy Newman has published four previous collections, mostly recently Dear Editor. She is editor of Ancora Imparo, the journal of arts, process, and remnant, and Professor of English at Northern Illinois University.