To See the Earth - Softcover

Philip Metres is the author of Behind the Lines: War Resistance Poetry on the American Homefront since 1941, as well as the translator, from the Russian, of CATALOGUE OF COMEDIC NOVELTIES: Selected Poems of Lev Rubinstein and A KINDRED ORPHANHOOD: Selected Poems of Sergey Gandlevsky. His work has also appeared in Best American Poetry, New England Review and Tin House. He teaches literature and creative writing at John Carroll University in Cleveland, Ohio.

"Do our voyages Auden once asked, 'still promise the Juster Life?' Too many of us would answer this question in negative -- not so Philip Metres. His poems seek above all to traverse borders, not merely those between nations and cultures but also -- and most importantly --between the personal and the political. With a sure command of craft, which he displays in abundance, Metres plays for high stakes. To See the Earth is a debut of unusual distinction." --David Wojahn

"Set in landscapes ranging from Russia to Kentucky, from Ephesus to the Murder Capital of the World (that's Gary, Indiana!), from Cleveland to Hiroshima, Philip Metres's superb poems explore the confusion and complexities that ordinary people face in talking to one another -- in the slippery language of everyday speech, or across the secured borders of grammar and history. Words are not abstractions to Metres -- they're as physical as fifty women making PEACE with their bodies, as mysterious as a bat soaring to unheard music, as illuminating as an ash tree 'burning into its name.' These poems echo in the mind long after the book is closed." --Maura Stanton

"Founded on a fault line, the poems in Philip Meters' first full-length collection navigate terrains as fraught as his grandfather's kitchen, Sarajevo, Hiroshima, and the Pushkin Square McDonald's. . . . Undaunted by the inaccessible, Metres never ventures far from the dream of origin, returning frequently to his childhood, where adult nightmares of Ivan the Terrible and the pounding of nails into 'Christ's ivory wrists,' as well as the poet's oracular burden, give way to simpler passages. . . . Though compelled to remember that even the most realized poems are a staging of reality, rather than its substitute, Meters' at-time-otherworldly, at-times-blissfully homebound speaker offers a powerful contribution to Derrida's hallucinatory discourse on the 'metaphysics of presence,' if only by alerting the reader to the possibility that what we so desperately seek -- the substantive, the real -- may, in fact, already be here." --MAR, Mid-American Review, Vol. XXVIII, No. 2