The World to Come

"Renowned poet and translator, David Keplinger authors his seventh original poetry collection. The World to Come is an investigation of possible and impossible worlds, where the fields of science and alchemy, astronomy and astrology, intersect as they once did in the Medieval and earlier mystical traditions. The worlds of its title are those of weather, the imagination, literature, planetary systems, and even other dimensions. David Keplinger extends Dante's visit to the concentric spheres, for the sake of disrupting the past's hold on our visions of the future."   David Keplinger is the author of seven books of poetry, recently Another City (Milkweed Editions, 2018), which was awarded the 2019 UNT Rilke Prize, and The Long Answer: Selected and New Poems (Texas A&M, 2020). He was the 2020 recipient of the Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Society of America, as well as a past recipient of the Cavafy Prize from Poetry International, the Colorado Book Award, the T.S. Eliot Prize, and two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. His volumes of translations include the 2017 collection, The Art of Topiary (Jan Wagner), and Forty-One Objects (Carsten René Nielsen), which was a finalist for the 2020 National Translation Award. He lives in Washington, D.C., and teaches at American University.   "No one writes prose poems like David Keplinger. He is one of a kind. Sui generis. But what does it mean? For me, it means that his imagination walks hand in hand with his sentences' music. He has an amazing sense of subtext -- what is unsaid, in these pages, is perhaps even more important than what is said. He is a poet who takes the likes of Cortazar, Calvino and company and makes them waltz, not because he borrows from them but because he extends the conversation, brings it into our moment. Sui generis, indeed." - Ilya Kaminsky "David Keplinger's The World to Come is a personal surrealism addressing boyhood and manhood, life and death—where the right-placed phrase or image changes the ordinary to satirical insight. These terse prose poems (en)act lyrical fables that assay philosophical worlds between worlds." - Yusef Komunyakaa