About the books:
Using a variety of forms and achieving a range of musical effects, Nate Klug’s Anyone traces the unraveling of astonishment upon small scenes—natural and domestic, political and religious—across America’s East and Midwest. The book’s title foregrounds the anonymity it seeks through several means: first, through close observation (a concrete saw, a goshawk, a bicyclist); and, second, via translation (satires from Horace and Catullus, and excerpts from Virgil’s Aeneid). Uniquely among contemporary poetry volumes, Anyone demonstrates fluency in the paradoxes of a religious existence: “To stand sometime / outside my faith . . . or keep waiting / to be claimed in it.” Engaged with theology and the classics but never abstruse, all the while the poems remain grounded in the phenomenal, physical world of “what it is to feel: / moods, half moods, / swarming, then darting loose.”
"Anthony Opal's series of unrhymed (or off-rhymed) sonnets begins with a prayer to everything or anything - from a lower case god to a "compassionate sloth" and a "homeless zoo keeper." In these poems reverence and rebellion, desperation and control joust. Then they dance. Opal's lines are consistently surprising (if that's possible) and, more important, they make me believe them." -RAE ARMANTROUT, author of Just Saying and recipient of the Pulitzer Prize
About the authors:
Nate Klug is the author of Rude Woods, a book-length adaptation of Virgil’s Eclogues. A UCC-Congregationalist minister, he has served churches in North Guilford, Connecticut, and Grinnell, Iowa.
Anthony Opal is the author of ACTION (Peanut Books, 2014) and editor of The Economy. His poems have appeared in Poetry, Boston Review, Intercourse, and elsewhere. He lives near Chicago with his wife and daughter.