The Constructor

"John Koethe's The Constructor is a scrupulous, elegant account of the meditative intellect as an instrument continually registering the passage of time. Exquisitely modulated and brutally honest, these poems would be harrowing were they not so seductively beautiful. No one writing in this country today sees as deeply as Koethe into the tears that lie at the heart of things, and no contemporary investigation of the life of the mind may be called complete that does not accommodate the lush intricacy of his terrifying recognitions."
-- George Bradley

"I prize John Koethe's intimate expanses and unsettling reveries, his tender contemplations and odd mental landscapes. He is an heir to Wallace Stevens and John Ashbery and, like them, he gives us the sensation of thinking itself, of a certain fleeting, daily, solitary consciousness rescued from oblivion and held aloft."
-- Edward Hirsch

John Koethe is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and the first Poet Laureate of Milwaukee, where he lives. His collection North Point North was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and his collection Falling Water won the Kingsley Tufts Award. In 2005 he was a Fellow of the American Academy in Berlin.