PRAISE FOR PAUL NEMSER’S TAURUS
“TAURUS is surreal and visionary, experimental and traditional, lyrical and narrative-all at the same time-and it is always strange and strangely compelling. In language that is vivid, fresh, and often startling, the book sets the myth of the abduction of Europa by Zeus against the demimonde of contemporary St. Petersburg. As it unfolds, the retelling becomes a metaphorical examination of the geo-political confusions of contemporary Russia-a love story on one hand and a story of desire on the other.”
— ANDREW HUDGINS
winner of the Hanes Poetry Prize
and the Witter Bynner Award for Poetry
“One of the most astonishing, breathtaking, and beautiful things I have read in a long time: and utter ecstasy. Nemser’s use, and control, of language is arresting, gripping in that way that only language of startling originality and power, i.e., true poetry, can be almost viscerally gripping. It is a hugely significant achievement, one that defies easy generic classification, as vividly visual as it is musical. I cannot remember reading anyting quite like it. And that Nemser is able to sustain this, through and entire rhapsodic, epic narrative, in so many different keys, is utterly electrifying. Really and truly a magnum opus.”
— HERBERT GOLDER
Arlon: A Journal of Humanitites and the Classics
“TAURUS is the most accomplished first book of poetry that I have encountered in the new milennium. It is moving, tortuous, tragic, but without a trace of the tragic mask. There’s no denial in TAURUS of the bleakness of our collective reality after September 11, but the imaginative energy has been channeled, converted, toward overcoming every immediate obstacle that stands in the way of a deeper revelation, which allows the language to ascend – amazingly – to a spiritual plane.”
— MARK RUDMAN
winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry, for Rider
