The Nature of Things Fragile: Poems

In his debut poetry collection, The Nature of Things Fragile, Peter Vertacnik depicts a world fraught with vulnerability and loss. Utilizing a wide range of both received and nonce poetic forms, including sonnets, villanelles, triolets, a sestina, epigrams, blank verse, and word-count, he confronts the illnesses and deaths of loved ones, both recent and long past (“Face Value,” “Odd Elegy,” “Trace,”); the memories of old houses and towns left behind (“Departure,” Sugar Beets,” “Mourning Doves”); and the vanishing of once-ubiquitous analog particulars (“Apology to Candles,” “Dial Tone,” “In Praise of Blank Cassettes”). It is indeed a book of elegies, but one that also celebrates the people, places, and things it laments, preserving their names and details while laying them to rest.  The Nature of Things Fragile is the winner of the twenty-third New Criterion Poetry Prize.

About the Author :
PETER VERTACNIK was born in Saginaw,Michigan. He holds degrees increative writing and English from theUniversity of Florida, Texas Tech University,and Penn State University. His poetry,translations, and criticism have appearedin 32 Poems, Bad Lilies, The CortlandReview, Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review,The Hopkins Review, Literary Matters,The New Criterion, Phoebe, Plume, TheSpectator (World), THINK, and Water~Stone Review. He lives in Jacksonville,Florida, where he teaches at EpiscopalSchool of Jacksonville.

Review :
Peter Vertacnik has curated “Forgotten Good Poems” online for years—all the while learning from his readings how to create memorable lines of his own: “No ashes now, just the syllables of doves.” The Nature of Things Fragile is full of poems that deserve to endure. — Amit Majmudar Peter Vertacnik is a poet of great emotional and intellectual range. The fact that The Nature of Things Fragile is his first collection seems almost incomprehensible. He possesses a refined touch, curiosity, humility, and ability to achieve wholeness that can be rare to find even in writers three or four books deep into their careers. To be sure, the love, longing, wit, and learning in this work are clearly hard-won, but these beautiful poems converse with their subjects in the most natural and compelling terms. Piece by piece, this book evokes in me a sense of kinship, trust, and admiration for the ways in which it distills experience and loveliness to discover such knowable yet highly elusive conundrums of the human heart. — Daniel Anderson I admire so many of these poems, from exquisitely crafted cameos such as “Wind” (a trenchant evocation of the “sharpened vacancy” of Lubbock) to the longer, more personal poems in an elegiac key. Born of Vertacnik’s keen-eyed, sympathetic vision and shaped by his considerable formal inventiveness and skill, The Nature of Things Fragile is a collection to savor. — Geoffrey Brock