Cosmogony

Winner of the 2024 Blue Light Book Award

Tony Crunk's first collection of poetry, Living in the Resurrection, was the 1994 selection in the Yale Series of Younger Poets. He has published a number of subsequent collections, as well as works in a variety of other genres, including A Theatre of Fine Devices, winner of the 2008 Blue Light Poetry Prize. He currently lives in St. Louis.

In this collection, Crunk . . . leverages a heft of images and syntactical fragments into lyrical and elegiac forms, negotiating embodied discontinuity and poetic intensity, finding the right note of compromise between his lived experience and his ability to demystify it by naming it too exactly. At times breathless in the compulsion to designate, capture, or render, Crunk's voice is steely and precise. . . With crisp language, he scrimshaws the interiors of his history and home, of his future and our own, onto the ivory of the page. . . . In a small space, Crunk embodies the consummate philosopher-poet, with a gaze fixed on the enchanting perplexities of our corporeal existence, but not so arrogant as to chide or humiliate them into revealing their secrets.

                                   - Dave Harrity, author of These Intricacies and Our Father in the Year of the Wolf