Description
- Kind: Perfectbound
- Pages: 104
- Language: English
- Date Published: April 2025
- ISBN 978-1-962847-21-6
Praise
The poems in James Cummins’ Everyday Knowledge delight in memory and daydream and the silver screen-nostalgia with wit and an edge. Cummins is a rebel with a cause and his cause is poetry even though his students have to google Marlon Brando. Cummins is also a forward-looking bard, with an especially touching poem for his daughters, “a time capsule they’ll come upon someday.” He is not afraid to explore the unsettling world of hypermasculinity, from guns to stalkers, from “wife-beaters” to wife-killers, while also offering this rather hilarious balm— “After the prostate is removed, / the male gaze, straight from the savannah, / turns inward …” You’ll learn something new in each poem in Everyday Knowledge. James Cummins continues to not only delight, but enlighten. —Denise Duhamel
Excerpt
Be Careful What You Wish For
One night as you’re staring
into the ‘abyss of erudition,’
the abyss loses interest in you
and moves on down the line—
sort of like metaphysical speed dating,
except you didn’t get the chance
to show it your credentials.
You’re ticked off, but it’s unfairness
that got you here to begin with,
right? One thing you’d been certain of
was that you were an interesting case—
could this be a wake-up call?
The abyss is way down the line now,
oblivious, leaving behind a nothingness
you peek out over the rim of,
like a child who’s just learned how
to stand up in his crib.
Author
James Cummins was born in Columbus, Ohio, in 1948, grew up in Cleveland and Indianapolis, and took degrees from the University of Cincinnati and the Iowa Writers Workshop. He’s published seven books of poems, including his latest, Recalcitrant Actors, (Dos Madres Press, 2021), as well as poems in many journals, including the American Poetry Review, Paris Review, Harper’s, AGNI, et al. His work appears in several anthologies, including The Oxford Book of American Poetry, 180 More, and five volumes of the Best American Poetry series. He lives in Cincinnati with his wife, the poet Maureen Bloomfield.
