Dreamlife of a Philanthropist

With a salve in one hand and a burcher’s knife in the other, Janet Kaplan offers her masterful third collection, Dreamlife of a Philanthropist, winner of the 2011 Ernest Sandeen prize in Poetry. The prose poems and sonnets in Dreamlife are packed with postmodern language-leaping, modern irony and absurdity, and a poet’s ageless ear for the pleasures of the lyric and formal experimentation. These are poems that can never quite abandon the hope that life--and language--are worthy pursuits; but they never offer up easy assurances about the benefits of humanity to anyone or anything. Get ready for dogs that wail and overtake the scene; an invitation to make love on a mattress of ants; and the philanthropist of the title, who dreams that people are tuned into fish. It’s ＂good luck and bad in random but equal measure,＂ Kaplan writes in ＂Life and Times.＂

Janet Kaplan is the author of two previous poetry collections, The Groundnote and The Glazier’s Country, and her poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, online and in print. She is the recipient of the Poets Out Loud Prize from Fordham University Press, the Alice James Books New England and New York prize, and grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Vogelstein Foundation, and Rattapallax Press (The Godot Grant in Poetry). She teaches at Hofstra University and Fordham University, where she is currently Poet in Residence.