A Drowning Man Is Never Tall Enough

This is a poetry of excursions: into maps of lost territories, into the thoughts of a man with no legs, into the life of a town marked by disasters.Patrick Lawler moves into the slender lines of shattered glass, the spaces between lyric and narrative, between metamorphosis and mutation. From the artful surface of a Russian novel, rich with symbolism and white bears, to a survivor's unwillingness to immerse himself in life or leave it, the poems inA Drowning Man Is Never Tall Enoughhunger for a language beyond the solid, for the fragmentation that makes a scene complete.

Patrick Lawler is the director of the Writing Program at SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry. He is also the author of the poetry collections Feeding the Fear of the Earth and Reading a Burning Book.