Radio, Radio

Radio, Radio - Cover

Poems

by Ben Doyle

Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets

74 pages / 6.00 x 9.00 inches / no illustrations

Poetry

Hardcover / 9780807126783 / March 2001
Paperback / 9780807126790 / March 2001

Radio, Radio, Ben Doyle’s first collection, is a book about gaps: between the transmitter and the desired, unimaginable receiver; between the prehistoric insect world and our fast-food, hot-wired culture; between words and what they just might mean. They meet us in the interstices between the moment just gone and the next one, with little agenda but to thrill, refresh, discomfit, and warn.

Doyle’s poems leap freely from sonnet to fragment to sestina to prose, searching for what they do not know. These are lyrics of a scintillant mind working at its farthest reaches. Throughout, startling images abound, along with a heated, complex musicality: “In the middle of every field, / obscured from the side by grass /or cornhusks, is a clearing where / she works burying swans alive / into the black earth” (“Radio, Radio”).

Alternately playful, grim, veritable, surreal, tempered, associative, wise, and astonished, Radio, Radiofinds its own place among the poetry of our day, a place where poems aim to be experiences — sensory, physical, and emotional as well as intellectual. 

A native of Cuba, New York, Ben Doyle is a recent graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and his poems have appeared in the Boston Review, Tin House, Fence, and The New Republic. He currently lives and teaches in Iowa City.

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