Praise for Earlier Books:

“By turns mandarin and earthy, intricate and bold, Autobiographies is both an exploration of our variegated national culture and a significant contribution to it. Sinuous and supple, his verse twines around our nomadic unease, rooting us in a poet's imagination. Alfred Corn is a national resource, a bard of astonishing breadth.”

—Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

“Alfred Corn is one of our finest living poets. He works in the visionary tradition of Whitman and Crane, and makes bold new use of classical and European influences. Besides artistry, Present contains urgent lessons for our time: presence, care, visibility…. Best of all, despite the largeness of his expectations, Corn is no softie. He eschews sentimentality. He is humorous, observant, quick to see awkward details, human failings, ironic mishaps.”

—Grace Schulman, The Nation, April 29, 1997

“Corn’s formal range is everywhere apparent. He even attempts sapphics in English which closely resemble what might be accomplished in the Greek. But as he understands art to be ‘always more than technical virtuosity,’ his poetry never merely displays his considerable poetic skills, but rather becomes a mode of thought, an inquiry into art and passion, the limits of mastery, mortality, divinity, and the possible destiny of the human soul.”

—Carolyn Forché, The Lambda Book Report, Spring, 1997

“Eminently cosmopolitan, he is a stylist of the first order, both in verse and in prose … Erudite without being pedantic, Corn draws deeply from our cultural history to establish correspondences between the most disparate entities…. In verse the author’s tone ranges from the pedagogical to the personal, and the two occur together often enough to suggest that teaching what he knows both to his own students and to his unseen readers, is for him an act of love.”

—William Ferguson, The New York Times Book Review, Nov. 30, 1997

About the Author

Alfred Corn is the author of eleven books of poems, the most recent titled Unions (2015) and two novels, the second titled Miranda’s Book, which also appeared in 2015. His two collections of essays are The Metamorphoses of Metaphor and Atlas: Selected Essays, 1989-2007. He has received the Guggenheim, the NEA, an Award in Literature from the Academy of Arts and Letters, and one from the Academy of American Poets. He has taught at Yale, Columbia, Connecticut College, The University of Cincinnati, and UCLA. In 2013 he was made a Life Fellow of Clare Hall, Cambridge. In 2015 he was guest speaker at the new museum in Wuzhen, China, dedicated to the work of the painter and writer Mu Xin. In the spring of 2016 Chamán Ediciones in Spain published Rocinante, a selection of his work translated in Spanish, the same translation appearing the following year in Mexico under the title Antonio en el desierto. A new collection of essays titled Arks & Covenants appeared in May of 2017. In October of 2016, Roads Taken, a celebration of the 40th anniversary of Alfred Corn’s first book All Roads at Once was held at Poets’ House in New York City, and in November 2017 he will be inducted into the Georgia Writers’ Hall of Fame.