Author Description

Product Description Ned Balbo's Sandeen Prize-winning collection of poetry seeks a voice for contemporary and historical figures as they face the ecstasy and grief of love. In these assured and powerful poems, Balbo's confidence in lyric, narrative, and dramatic forms is always evident: lovers whirl in Dante's circle, saints suffer for their faith, and characters from Hitchcock films are caught in traps of their own making. With energy and insight, Balbo gives us Alice Liddell's last word on Lewis Carroll's infatuation, a Victorian heroine who uncovers a wax museum's hidden crimes, and a bestiary where courtship rituals are both savage and redemptive. Lives of the Sleepers explores the connections of men and women across the centuries, and interrogates those patterns that always reassert themselves. These sleepers are joined in a dialogue that transcends any one era. The joy of their connection and the grief of their separation also reflect the history of our own age. Review “Dark and moving, sometimes morbid, yet also haunting in its search to understand the human mind, consciousness, emotion and expression, Lives of The Sleepers is profound and memorable.” ―Wisconsin Bookwatch "The dramatic monologues in Ned Balbo's Lives of the Sleepers are superb, the lyrics enthralling, and the meditations haunting. Balbo's taut lines pulse with life―the life of the moment in which they live and the lives of the great poets whom Balbo has assimilated, and transformed with his love. In the nuanced profundity of the past's living in the present and the present's being alive to the past, Balbo's aesthetic intelligence shimmers in every line of this powerful book." ―Andrew Hudgins, Ohio State University, and author of Ecstatic in the Poison "Many of the poems in Ned Balbo's new collection seem to center around a moment when the various sleepers provided by his erudite imagination awaken into their lives, or into their lives transform