Flaws, Poems by David Galef

The poems of David Galef's Flaws belie their title: they flawlessly evoke the foibles and frailties of human experience with humor and grit, and do so with an effortless formal craft. Flaws is a poetry collection to be both savored and admired.

Sample Poems by David Galef

“David Galef knows what Richard Pryor knew: ‘Comedy is tragedy,’ the comedian said. As Galef’s Flaws explores, with an undeceived but not unkind eye, the flaws of love, the South, literature, and the academy, the poet engages us with serious and precise wit. The book is never less than entertaining, as it engages in the crucial and yet impossible work of ‘hoping the sugar will undissolve,/Emerging pristine on the spoon.’”—Andrew Hudgins

“We’ve known David Galef since 68 B.C., glimpsed him traveling in the company of Quintus Horatius Flaccus. We met David Galef again in 1726, found him swabbing the deck with gusto, a ship’s mate on the voyages of Lemuel Gulliver. Wit and satire, we’ve known them both, and found in them the kinds of comforts that only laughing at ourselves affords. Here, in his twenty-first century incarnation, we find David Galef well-met by his talents and his subjects, ever our urbane roving reporter posting stories on the current commedia. For this, as the good poets do, he deserves danger pay.”—Alan Michael Parker

“If you think contemporary poetry has to be humorless and meterless, Flaws could change your mind. It abounds with wit and insight—and sometimes just plain fun—usually set to a cadenced music. Many of the poems can be called ‘light verse’ (in the good sense of the term), though some are broodingly serious and others seriocomic. Galef can play light against shadow to create stark, compelling images reminiscent of a Hopper painting. But he’s equally adept at Groucho-like wordplay and irreverence. Throughout this wide tonal range abides the poet’s humane intelligence.”—William Trowbridge

David Galef has published a dozen books in addition to Flaws: the novels Flesh, Turning Japanese, and How to Cope with Suburban Stress; the short-story collection Laugh Track; two children’s books, The Little Red Bicycle and Tracks; two translations of Japanese proverbs, Even Monkeys Fall from Trees and Even a Stone Buddha Can Talk; a work of literary criticism, The Supporting Cast; an edited anthology of essays called Second Thoughts: A Focus on Rereading; a critical edition of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles; and a co-edited anthology of fiction called 20 over 40. In addition, he has written over seventy short stories for magazines ranging from the British Punch to the Czech Prague Revue, the Canadian Prism International and the American Shenandoah. Over eighty poems have been published in Witness, The Formalist, The Laurel Review, Light, and elsewhere. His essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, Newsday, The Village Voice, Twentieth Century Literature, The Columbia History of the British Novel, and many other places. His awards include a Henfield Foundation grant, a Writers Exchange award from Poets & Writers, and a Mississippi Arts Council grant, as well as residencies at Yaddo and Ragdale. He is a professor of English at the University of Mississippi, where he also administers the M.F.A. program in creative writing.

ISBN 978-1933456560, 100 pages

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