The Captain Lands in Paradise
Sarah Manguso
Named one of "Our 25 Favorite Books of 2002" by The Village Voice.
Sarah Manguso's first collection, a combination of verse and prose poems, explores love, nostalgia, remorse, and the joyful and mysterious preparation for the discoveries of new lands, selves, and ideas. The poems are accessible yet cryptic, and the voice is consistently spare, honest, understated—and eccentric.
"Rarely does a first book resolve itself so assuredly to such a singly consistent and instructive rhetoric as The Captain Lands in Paradise."
—Boston Review
"While she may be 'only trying to find my drink/ and to communicate without lying,' Manguso accomplishes a great deal more."
—Publishers Weekly
"Sarah Manguso's poems weirdly plumb and strikingly frame what we're up against:
the now in which the Muse drives a silver pickup, mystery only announces itself out of
grief for us, and to reach harbor is to understand there will be no end of searching. Hers
is a startling, disturbing, and original voice."
—Carl Phillips
"At times disarmingly straightforward, at others elegantly
convoluted, Sarah Manguso's poems evade and persuade us of the perils and fleshed
restitutions of the imaging, mortal life. Again and again, their language inhabits the
cusp between playfulness and dark revelation, between gaming and cri de coeur so we are
torn, reading, between consolation and alarm. With an apocalyptic exuberance as well as
the clarity of truthful recall, The Captain Lands in Paradise has an impact that
belies its marvelously deft touch."
—Dean Young
about the author
Sarah Manguso is the author of The Captain Lands in Paradise (2002) and Siste Viator (2006), forthcoming from Four Way Books. With Jordan Davis she coedited the anthology Free Radicals: American Poets Before Their First Books (2004). Her poems and prose have appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Believer, Boston Review, The London Review of Books, McSweeney’s, The New Republic, and The Paris Review, and twice in the Best American Poetry series.
Educated at Harvard and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she was the Hodder Fellow in Poetry at Princeton in 2003–2004. Her other honors include a Bread Loaf Fellowship and a Pushcart Prize. She teaches at the Pratt Institute and in the New School’s M.F.A. program, and lives in Brooklyn.
Author photo by Michael Galinsky
two poems from the captain lands in paradise
an interview with sarah manguso (by lance phillips).
sarah manguso's upcoming reading dates, on the mcsweeney's website.
