To the Heart of the World

Poetry. Andy Stallings' debut collection, TO THE HEART OF THE WORLD, operates in exuberance and exhaustion, trance and ricochet, aware of both its exile from and unremitting attachment to so-called "community" (friends, colleagues, students, beloveds, long- dead poets, and well-worn texts) even as he presents the bewildering solitude inherent in shared experience. Stallings is an astounding contemporary flaneur, and the poems wander in and out of boredom and lust and rage and wonder and addiction and forgiveness and awe. TO THE HEART OF THE WORLD is most of all an epistolary argument for intimacy and attention, and a record of the "bitter surplus / of that music."