Many people fashion themselves poets. They stay quiet when everyone else talks. They find drama in their Budweisers, call the sky cobalt, and sometimes kind of smell (or is that just me?). Less than many people who fashion themselves poets are truly decent working poets — you know, the kind whose work you actually want to read. And fewer people still look like poets and write like poets and are respected by poets and have their poems praised in poetry magazines.

Case in point: Ben Mazer.

Recently Mazer (January 2008 / Dark Sky Books) was praised in Jacket Magazine.

Here’s a snippet from the review, written by Christopher Bock:

The poems in January 2008 sputter like severed electrical wires firing and trying to find a place to reconnect their currency. Handling these poems is like handling live electricity. As in Poems, the poet is composing a symphony of objects for the ear and mind. Yet these poems feel more desperate, more exhausted, more alive, and less apparently wedded to the English lyric tradition.

It seems extremely difficult to talk about a book that contains 135 poems, the bulk of which are without titles, which enact such a broad range of verse as:

Ice kindled trees to life in passive fog.
The shadows settle on the wires log
too absent early. Then he heard eavesdrop
the marching others hush and the wind stop.

and:

Snaggly waggly went to fair,
saw the natty raccoon there.
When the raccoon went to play,
Snaggly waggly ran away.

These two isolated examples speak to the range of the poems contained within January 2008. There are moments of grace in which the self confronts the self in the shadow of nature and the echo of the sublime.

Read the entire review at Jacket Magazine.

And if you want to get your hands on some of Ben’s poetry, visit Dark Sky Books now and we’ll ship you a copy of his stellar collection.

Poems by Ben Mazer

As most of you know, Ben Mazer’s new collection of poetry, January 2008, is now available through Dark Sky Books. It’s a fine collection of poetry. We are proud and jumpy with excitement because of it. We want everybody in the world to read this book. We also want those of you who might be short on cash to not miss out on a topnotch reading experience. That’s why, for the month of April, we’re offering January 2008 at a discounted price — half off.

That’s $8.50.

Not bad for over 100 badass poems that will fill your brain with a happy buzz.

Is there a catch? Not really. Only that we’re limiting the number of discounted orders to 20 books. If you’re interested, email us today.

Save some cash, support poetry, and defy the notion that April is cruel.

Read more about January 2008 here.

January 2008, by Ben Mazer

Ben Mazer is a busy man. This spring alone he is celebrating the release of three new books:

* January 2008 (Dark Sky Books)

* POEMS (Pen & Anvil Press)

* Selected Poems of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman (Harvard University Press)

We applaud Mazer’s achievement and feel both honored and excited to work with him. He’s a tremendous poet.

For those of you interested in hearing Ben read from his new collections, the following readings are coming up in  NYC, St. Louis, and Harvard Square.

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