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"All the characters in this volume of poetry, whether the author created them or not, have a commonality of realness, in the sense that they evoke a personal, human truth. . . . a commonness that somehow, when drawn out, appears to have an aspect of beauty. . . . Wormser is a wordsmith."
—ForeWord Magazine
"Wormser sets his tone—vigorous, irreverent, smartass. Yet for all the verve and waggery, this isn't a superficial book; Wormser is as good at communicating credible feeling as he is at laugh lines. . . . At their best, Wormser's poems have the mordant humor, urgency, and dread of Hemingway's short stories. They're the real thing."
—The Hudson Review
"His poems are narratives as varied as those of a Jewish furniture maker in the race-divided furniture store of Wormser's youth and a timber-hauling trucker traveling the roads of rural Maine. The poems are set in places as diverse as Las Vegas, Pikesville, Dachau. They touch on subjects as current as war crimes and AIDS. They feature figures of history and art such as St. Augustine and Mark Rothko. They speak in the voices of Beethoven's maid, a cook. His poems are narratives as named Mulroney, a draft dodger in Canada."
—The Baltimore Sun
Baron Wormser, a master of the persona poem, is well known for his empathic exploration of possible lives. This fifth collection of poetry by this "fiction writer in a poet's body," includes an examination of his own life as well.
Mulroney & Others provides glimpses of Wormser's childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, as well as accounts of Vietnam vets and draft dodgers, socialites and outcasts. Loyal readers will welcome his trademark poise, the elegant balance he achieves with understatement both metrically deft and intellectually intricate. These poems prove Anaïs Nin's insight that "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are."
Wormser's invitation to engage ourselves in seeing is irresistible, especially as he models the process with such impassioned interest. "‘I know,' everyone is saying at once / To one another and the word-riddled universe. . . ." he writes. His poems tempt us to trade the obscurity of facile assumption for the powerful illumination of wonder. In Wormser's words, the universe is irrefutably personal.
Baron Wormser is the author of seven books of poetry, a poetry chapbook, a collection of short stories, a memoir, and is the coauthor of two books about teaching poetry. He directs the Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching and teaches in the Stonecoast MFA Program. He is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and served as Poet Laureate of Maine from 2000 to 2005. He lives with his wife in Cabot, Vermont.
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