Immortal Sofa

In accessible poems full of rich detail and painterly images, Maura Stanton looks under the surface of the ordinary, hoping to find the magic spark below the visible. In poems both humorous and elegiac, she gathers strange facts, odd events, and overlooked stories to construct her own vision of immortality, one made up of fragments of history and geography and the illusions of yearning human beings. From elephants in Ceylon to Nazi prisoners in Ireland, from Beowulf to Jane Austen, from sonnets to prose poems to blank verse, Immortal Sofa conjures our complex existence in all its sorrowful but astonishing variety.

Maura Stanton is a professor of English and creative writing at Indiana University. She has published five books of poetry, including Snow on Snow and Glacier Wine, as well as a novel and three collections of short stories. Her poems and stories have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Poetry, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, The Chicago Tribune, The Antioch Review, and The New Yorker.