Now Make an Altar

Out of this book's gathering of speakers (arsonist, leper, Captain Haddock, the maître d' of an unusual restaurant) and subjects (dung beetle, Aristophanes, medieval surgeon, methamphetamines) emerges a baroque, musical, and formally inventive history of creation and destruction. Now Make an Altar dispassionately suggests that there can't be one without the other. And there is nothing, however broken, absurd, atrocious, or sublime that cannot be brought into ecstatic focus in this "mysterious feast" of dense and exacting language. "Come in, come sup," Beeder invites us in the book's opening poem. "You'll never feel full."

Amy Beeder

Amy Beeder is the author of Burn the Field (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2006). Her work has appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, The Nation, The Kenyon Review, and other journals. She teaches poetry at the University of New Mexico.

Reviews

The counterthrust of Beeder's musical rhythms and striking imagery suggest that her project is to make beautiful metaphor of our dangerous world.

—West Branch

She creates a musical, at times mythical, exploration of how we construct beauty and strangeness.

—Poetry

Ordering Information

To purchase Now Make an Altar by Amy Beeder, please contact our distributor, University Press of New England toll free at 1-800-421-1561 or by fax at 1-603-448-9729. The book is also available online at UPNE, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and other fine retailers.

To request a copy for review, please contact the Carnegie Mellon University Press Editorial Offices at (412) 268-2861 or by email at CarnegieMellonUniversityPress@gmail.com.