A Suit of Paper Feathers

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Series Editor: Jon Thompson

A Suit of Paper Feathers engages landscape, gender, and time through ecopoetic lyricism and site-specificity. Families create syncopated mythologies from the psychic offal of hyperobjects. Rural voices interrogate issues of work and land-use on the fringes of empire. These poems seek a dynamic affinity between linguistic beings and the fragile biome we inhabit.

In A Suit of Paper Feathers, backwoods apocryphal folk tales merge with data mining and boyhood spaceship fantasies, and the intimacies of lovers are treated with the same reverence as the intricacies of wetland irrigation. These poems push language to its furthest limits, each line crystallized in amber; what lurks in the space of the unsaid will hollow you out like the hole beneath an uprooted oak. The heart of this collection is indeed "a litter of puppies in the stomach of an alligator," and as we follow the shapeshifting speaker from Texarkana to Missoula, through the flatlands of Illinois and the swamplands of Louisiana, Nate Duke proves himself to be a league of poet all his own. Ragged and elegant, A Suit of Paper Feathers left me in awe at what poetry can accomplish when spun by a masterful hand. -Erin Slaughter, author of The Sorrow Festival

This book is a tender damnation. Nate Duke constructs a contemporary Americana that is, at first, comfortingly familiar. But soon, winds swirl, and it is time to hide in the tornado cellar-to spoon canned corn next to a kerosene lamp. These poems are as precise as a factory line in the Ozark mountains-readying the neighbors for the end times, or an apocalypse. Tucking them in and lulling them to sleep with deft epiphanies and cunning images. More impressive, though, is Duke's intimate contortion and interrogation of language. This book is devastatingly clever. A beautiful and violent fork of lightning. A knockout debut collection. -Collin Callahan, author of Thunderbird Inn

The intellect in A Suit of Paper Feathers makes its ample bursts of tenderness and playfulness disarming. Duke fuses dirty realism with the surreal impeccably. Strange and powerful, his images and wordplay delight on every page. With this debut, the poet proves himself an innovator and essential voice in ecopoetics. In A Suit of Paper Feathers, nature accepts human cruelty with grace, while the book's speaker self-destructs with great heart. "Don't look at me I only want / my mom to like me," Duke writes, his speaker avoiding a house "where someone knows me like a faucet." Yet the book invites us to look at and know him and to see him profoundly in ourselves. -Brett Hanley, author of Defeat the Rest

Nate Duke's work has appeared in Paris Review, GRANTA, Colorado Review, and elsewhere. He holds a PhD from Florida State University and an MFA from the University of Montana. A sculptor as well as a poet, he lives in Fayetteville, Arkansas. A Suit of Paper Feathers is his debut collection.