Stunning poetry that explores the complex relationship between past and present.

Turning bare description into a luxuriance, The Known World looks at the complex relationship of past and present, creating energetic juxtaposition between different historic periods to envision life at the end of our own century. Don Bogen calls the work an archeology, and uses details f life in past eras as a way of penetrating the surfaces of history. In his account, everything known is both encumbered with and defined by the past. Short poems in this collection cohere around the long title poem, which explores the nineteenth century through more than thirty sections in different voices and styles, including lists, mock letters, brief narratives, and lyric passages. The result is lively and illuminating.

“How much, by now, Bogen has made himself the poet of things, how many fruitful and even fretful collisions there can be between the questing mind, the receiving heart, and those objects out there . . . Emerson was right about things being in the saddle—but Bogen holds the reins!”—Richard Howard

“One of the most remarkable and unsettling aspects of The Known World is the way in which the wonderful and odd events Bogen describes about the nineteenth century, slowly, inevitably, begin to sound like events of the present century and how they echo the dark details of our particular lives. In The Known World Bogen has discovered the stories that will illuminate the threshold of the next millennium.”—Michael Collier

DON BOGEN is Associate Professor of English at the University of Cincinnati and author of A Necessary Order (1991) and the prize-winning book of poetry, After the Splendid Display (1986).

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