FEAR OF DESCRIPTION

For readers of contemporary poets addressing millennial concerns, economic anxieties, modern technology, and urban life comes a collection by the winner of the 2018 National Poetry Series competition, selected by Brenda Shaughnessy.

These poems tell the story of a generation in crisis: at odds with its own ideals, precariously (or just un-)employed, and absolutely terrified of seeing itself in the planet's future. Is our contemporary moment pure tragedy, or a strange joke? Can it be both? Cutting back and forth in time and ranging formally between sonnets, elegies, and autobiographical prose accounts of a group of poets moving from the rural Midwest to Brooklyn in the years just before and after the 2016 election, FEAR OF DESCRIPTION explores the slippery terrain between grief and friendship, artifice and social media, writing and ritual, hauntings and obsessions - searching for joy in art but instead finding it in pitch darkness.

This book was one of the five winners of the 2018 National Poetry Series competition.

Daniel Poppick's first book of poetry, The Police, was published by Omnidawn in 2017. His writing has appeared in BOMB Magazine, Granta, The New Republic, Fence, the PEN Poetry Series, and other journals. The recipient of awards from the MacDowell Colony and the Corporation of Yaddo, and a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, he has taught writing at the University of Iowa, Coe College, and the Parsons School of Design.