Page last updated: November 23, 2018

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INTIMACIES & OTHER DEVICES

Poems by Kurt Heinzelman

“In Intimacies & Other Devices Kurt Heinzelman has created a marvelous hommage to the erotic in all its forms and manifestations, a world in which, as he so originally puts it, taste’s ‘one true sommelier’ is beauty and ‘constellations of geese’ can actually be seen as ‘fellating the starstruck skies.’ This is a poet not ashamed of lust, and its accompanying hunger for beauty, at any age, and who knows how to make of those hungers a world both subtle and celebrative at once. A wonderful book, one that will bring pleasure, in the deepest sense, to all who encounter it.”—MICHAEL BLUMENTHAL, author of Hurry Up: Poems 2000-2012

“It is wonderful to experience a poet’s bounty, as we do in Kurt Heinzelman’s rich new volume, with its expansive variety of voices, inventions and moods, across a range from probing reflection to sheer rapture. It’s fine to be with a poet who can find words for the deepest intimacies of love, of what can pass between men and women. It’s a pleasure, too, to participate in the playful re-interpretation of long traditions in the hands of one who knows, to feel the spring of poetic rhythm and the eloquence of the intricately concentrated expression, as memory, desire, humor and sensuality are shaped in virtuosic language.”—NICHOLAS JOSE, novelist and editor of the Norton Anthology of Australian Literature

“Kurt Heinzelman’s wonderful new collection is full-on plural, replete both with intimacies and with the great range of devices poets and lovers employ. Ballads whose diction ranges from ‘wont’ and ‘my lady’ to ‘giddyup’ and ‘nipple rings,’ free-ranging adaptations of Horace, Neruda, and Eluard, ‘The Principles of Adultery’ based on the indices of refraction—these poems are wildly imaginative and very, very sexy.”—ELLEN DORÉ WATSON, author of Dogged Hearts

KURT HEINZELMAN’s latest books, both published in 2011, are The Names They Found There (poems) and Demarcations (a translation of Jean Follain’s Territoires). He is editor-at-large for Bat City Review, editor-in-chief of Texas Studies in Literature and Language, and a member of the Texas Institute of Letters.

Intimacies & Other Devices could be classified as poetry written by an “intellectual romantic”–his poems range from classical and contemporary emotive poetry to ballads that are adaptations of Paul Verlaine, Pablo Neruda, Homer, and others. . . . Heinzelman’s work is playful and sensual as he acknowledges Eros, and he seems totally unabashed about celebrating lust in “Lust, At Your Age: ‘A cello with no/need so dire/it stirs any echo/A viola with a/lilt so tender it/fills every hollow./A violin as un-/equivocally civil/as a stand/of sugar maples/that first warm week/before they run.’ . . .” Read the Full Review by Diane M. Moore, A Word’s Worth Blog

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ALSO BY KURT HEINZELMAN:

Whatever You May Say (2017)

From ghazal to closet drama, sonnets, haiku, translations, allusions (Paul Mariani), the poems meditate on sunflowers, barking dogs, Texas landscapes, dachshunds, memory, and wars (Wendy Barker). Heinzelman's poems possess the qualities of music and intelligence (Steven Weinberg); rich and inventive, their playfulness opens up to genuine feeling (Lawrence Raab).

6"x9" paperback, 144 pages, ISBN: 978-1-936671-44-1, $16.00