Collected Poems: 3: Poems 1997-2003

Peter Reading has been one of Britain’s most original and controversial angry, uncompromising, gruesomely ironic, hilarious, and heartbreaking-as funny as he is disconcerting. Skillful and technically inventive, he mixes the matter and speech of the gutter with highly sophisticated metrical and syllabic patterns to produce scathing and grotesque accounts of lives blighted by greed, ignorance, political ineptness, and cultural impoverishment. This third volume of his Collected Poems includes the complete texts of Work in Regress, Ob., Marfan, [untitled], and Faunal, as well as a new long poem, Civil, and a new collection. Peter Reading won the inaugural Lannan Literary Award for Poetry in 1990, and held the first Lannan Foundation Literary Residency in 1998-1999. The first two volumes of the Collected Poems are also available.