Unknown Friends

From the winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the Ruth Lilly Prize

Carl Dennis has become one of the most important American poets writing today. Unknown Friends, his tenth book, is about separation and connection, about actual friends we can never know fully and friends never met who are summoned into existence through the efforts of an imagination that insists on dialogue. While accepting our ignorance as inevitable, the poems work to expand the notion of what it means to be part of a community larger than any we can comprehend, both a community given to us by history and one outside of history through which the world of experience is nurtured and sustained.

Carl Dennis is a poet who has valuable things to say—about faith (or its absence) in the modern world, fear, and regret—in ways that are personal and universal at the same time. . . . Dennis constantly surprises. (Joseph Parisi)Carl Dennis is the author of nine books of poetry, including Practical Gods, winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. A recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, in 2000 he was awarded the Ruth Lilly Prize from Poetry Magazine and the Modern Poetry Association for his contribution to American poetry. He teaches in the English Department at the State University of New York at Buffalo, and is a sometime member of the faculty of the MFA program in creative writing at Warren Wilson College.