The Floating Bridge: Prose Poems

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David Shumate is the author of High Water Mark, winner of the 2003 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize. His work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, North American Review, Atlanta Review, Mississippi Review, and Mid-American Review, among other publications. Shumate is poet-in-residence at Marian College in Indianapolis, Indiana.

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"I was deeply taken by David Shumate's The Floating Bridge. There is none better working now at this very difficult genre, the prose poem." - Jim Harrison "Even the most enthusiastic partisans of the form will tell you that good prose poems are nearly as rare as good sonnets, the manatee, or Republicans with a social conscience, and thus the canny and compelling prose poems of David Shumate's The Floating Bridge are especially welcome. The poems are filled with surprising imaginative reckonings, wit that never devolves into mere whimsy, and an underlying sense of pathos that recalls the work of some of the great European masters of the form - figures like Zbigniew Herbert and Jean Follain. The Floating Bridge is a collection to savor and return to." - David Wojahn "This is the best, most spectacular book of prose poetry to be published in years. The poems are woven from a natural voice that uses daily human knowledge and experience to paint timeless portraits that reverberate with imagination and a trust in simple language. The result is a book that emerges from the growing self-consciousness of the prose poem to show us how a straight-ahead vision carries the most weight." - Bloomsbury Review on High Water Mark "David Shumate's devotion to the prose poem is persuasive evidence of its movement in from the margins (or perhaps of poetry's movement out to the margins). High Water Mark: Prose Poems reads like the work of a conversational free-verse poet who has decided that line breaks are a needless vestigial reflex. His funny, tender little allegories are how Carl Dennis or Billy Collins might write if the Return keys fell off their laptops." - New York Times on High Water Mark"