Still Some Cake

Cummins's quiet, lunatic meditations—wait, that should be luminous meditations—are great fun. From father-son stuff, and women grousing about that sentimentality, to killing someone in your basement, or turning into a locust, or imagining his wife's violent death, Cummins hasn't lost his touch. Though he does lose his hand in one of these. Maybe it should be numinous meditations? In various emergencies?

James Cummins

James Cummins was born in Ohio and grew up in the Midwest. He attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop. His first book, The Whole Truth, a sequence of sestinas about the Perry Mason characters, was reissued in 2003 in the Classic Contemporary Series at Carnegie Mellon University Press. His other books include Portrait in a Spoon, Then & Now, and, co-authored with David Lehman, Jim and Dave Defeat the Masked Man, a collection of the poets' sestinas. He is curator of the Elliston Poetry Collection at the University of Cincinnati, and is married to the poet Maureen Bloomfield.

Reviews

James Cummins's Still Some Cake is filled with brilliant poems—"This Night of All Nights," "My Father's Hair," "The Greatest Generation," "The War of All Against All," and "Moses"—to name just some of the longer ones—written in an effortless, fluent style that presents surprises in almost every line. But the book transcends its individual poems, as its recurring obsessions—the burdens of the proximity of those closest to us, including ourselves—surface and resurface in the context of the family romance, history and war, the solitary, violent imagination, the narrative of the Bible—to create a fugue-like whole, by turns harrowing and exhilarating. Still Some Cake is one of the most powerful books in recent memory.

—John Koethe

Ordering Information

To purchase Still Some Cake by James Cummins, 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.