A Provisional Map of the Lost Continent: Poems(Poets Out Loud)

About the Book

A Provisional Map of the Lost Continent charts a territory built of speculative histories, indeterminate landscapes, and mock narratives, all of them at the threshold linking exterior and interior worlds. Their logic is highly grammatical and slyly confounding, perfectly clear and drawn from dream. It is here, "between / what is occluded and what has elapsed," that Mahrer's ambiguous, disordered subjects begin their journeys.

Table of Contents:
I Red City Studies (Graphite and Pollen) Drift Ciudad de Oro Itinerary of Fire Hinterland Franciscan Melange Blackout Travelogue The Age of Glass Whiteout An Unaddressed Envelope Fills with Snow Alternation of Flight and Perching II Fable Refrain Under: Variations Ciudad de Plata Vacancy Chimera Flurry En Las Calles de Borges Inquest at Century's End Empty Square, Twilight Corner Plot Raft Verge Colony III Understory A Provisional Map of the Lost Continent Ciudad de las Manos Dinner Guests Ideograph Icelandia A Sequence of Knots Fandango Defenestration As in the Letter O Glossolalia Accident Camera Obscura Apprenticeship Afterlife

About the Author :
Gregory Mahrer's poems have been published in The New England Review, The Indiana Review, Green Mountains Review, Volt, Colorado Review, and elsewhere. He lives and works in rural northern California and Baja California Sur, Mexico. John Yau is a poet and critic who lives in New York City. He has published more than 50 books of poetry, artists' books, fiction, and art criticism.

Review :
"I'm not sure exactly how Greg Mahrer catches 'the weak sunlight of old empires' in the prism of this book, but everywhere these poems refract that light into its constituent spectrum: discovery and conquest, migration and homesteading, civilization and ruin, artifacts and absences. These poems somehow capture the exact feel of a consciousness continually hinged between these violent opposites. And somehow their careful, intelligent craftsmanship helps them thrive where they find themselves, 'Stranded between/what is occluded and what has elapsed.' Indeed, Mahrer makes music, as only a poet can, out of the sound of time as it turns into history." -- -Brian Teare author of The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven "With high-wire imagination and hybrid language, A Provisional Map of the Lost Continent surveys a world post-catastrophic, elasticized, semi-mythic yet founded in the real. Scribbling clerks, horse carts, and confectioners coincide with glass towers, climate-caused sea rise, and species extinction. In this book, makings and fracturings become part of one gesture. Gregory Mahrer's continually burning city consumes, it seems, all futures, all lives, and the ember at the center of virtually every sentence is an irreversible, prophetic, and utterly accurate grief." -- -Jane Hirshfield "Gregory Mahrer, who listens carefully to the voices inside him, and does not reject the reports they bring him, full of terrifying and beautiful music, wrote this wise and beautiful book. We would be remiss not to listen to what he has come to tell us." -- -John Yau from the foreword