Selected by Dean Young as winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry, Fludde draws on Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience to critique and dismantle contemporary American values and conditioning: commodification, imperialism, toxic masculinity. Surreal and satirical, Mishler channels the voices of disillusioned middle management alongside the freewheeling imaginative vision of children to disrupt the fixity of our received ideas.
"…Fludde reminds us vulnerability is a precursor for transformation. I feel something in them I always trust: the deployment of form, musicality, narrative, and wild association, permitting the reader to see beyond the life of a single poet, and outside our current moment. The poems are not cut-up essays. They are not political diatribes. They know what Lorca knew: there's a drop of duck's blood
Dean Young, from the Introduction
"In this uncompromising collection, it is understood that shades of the prison house begin to close upon the growing self, and that the sound of the chimneysweeper's broom is "-weep -weep." There's a powerful moral imagination at work in Fludde, and its poems are darkly and passionately self-knowing about the consequences of how the childhood self is, as it grows, incorporated into the world aroun
David Ferry, author of Bewilderment, winner of the National Book Award for poetry
