Wrong

Wrong

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The poems of Shepherd's third book seek to redefine the meaning of mythology, from the ruined representatives of Greek divinity to the dazzling extravagances of predecessors like Hart Crane and Wallace Stevens.

Wrong (Pitt Poetry Series)
(click to buy online now)

Format: Paperback, 96pp.
ISBN: 0822957116
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Pub. Date: November 1999

"All the ways in which Reginald Shepherd is "wrong" (not white, not straight, not apologetic, not believing in any easy way of making sense) fire these compelling poems-which brilliantly filter their urban, late twentieth century experience through the gorgeous diction of Marlowe and Hart Crane. This book is absolutely fresh, energized by the ways Shepherd refuses the "right" in favor of a dark and lustrous matrix of desire and race, the longing for a sense of actually, the beautiful and resistant surfaces of language and skin. Wrong is a fearless and radiant book"
~Mark Doty, author of Atlantis and Sweet Machine (from back cover of book)

Reginald Shepherd received his B.A. from Bennington College and M.F.A. degrees from both Brown University and the University of Iowa. His first book, Some Are Drowning, was the 1994 AWP Award Winner in Poetry; his second collection, Angel, Interrupted, was a finalist for the 1997 Lambda Literary Award. Shepherd is the recipient of a 1993 "Discovery"/The Nation Award, a 1993 Paumanok Poetry Award, the 1994D1995 Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship, the 1994 George Kent Prize from Poetry, a 1995 NEA Creative Writing Fellowship, and a 1998 Illinois Arts Council Poetry Fellowship.

His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Gettysburg Review, Iowa Review, Kenyon Review, The Nation, Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, and TriQuarterly, as well as in the 1995 and 1996 editions of The Best American Poetry. He lives in Ithaca, New York, and is an assistant professor of English at Cornell University.