Green Sees Things in Waves : Poems

1996 Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

In this powerful and inventive collection, August Kleinzahler succeeds in creating a new idiom for American lyric poetry that captures the velocity and swerves of contemporary life in the city. He pushes the language very hard to get there, and the results are breathtaking: an angular, propulsive poetry that transforms character, voice, and setting into buzzing, luminous events.

“[Kleinzahler's] best successes are just as crisp and pungent as Pound's most startling images.” —DeSales Harrison, Boston Book Review

“This new book is full of off-kilter yet dead-on observations that hover just above our recognition until their very sound trips the brainwire and the 'little truth' falls into place.” —Albert Mobilio, Salon