Cemeteries and Galaxies: Poems

John Koethe unravels timeless questions of death, math, meaning, and much more in this mesmerizing collection.

John Koethe, one of our most philosophically sophisticated poets, has written a book of pithy, contentious, witty poems about our perennial, never-satisfied search for meaning.

The silent mysteries of the stars and the mute beauty of human graves have deep similarities that Koethe probes in these poems with a wondering, wandering gimlet eye that will delight the reader when they don’t terrify them.

Cemeteries and Galaxies is an extraordinarily provocative and, perhaps surprisingly, consoling book.

John Koethe has published eleven books of poetry and has received the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, and the Frank O’Hara Award. He has also published books on Ludwig Wittgenstein, philosophical skepticism, and poetry, as well as the recent essay collection Thought and Poetry. He is Distinguished Professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.