Jamey Dunham

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Biographical note:  Jamey Dunham’s award-winning prose poems have been published widely and appear in several anthologies including The Best American Poetry 2005 (Scribner, 2005). Jamey is the Co-Editor of the textbook anthology An Introduction to the Prose Poem (Firewheel Editions, 2009) and teaches as an Associate Professor of English at Sinclair Community College in Dayton, Ohio. He lives in Cincinnati, Ohio with his wife and their two children.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844715633
ISBN:  9781844715633
Author:  Jamey Dunham
Title:  The Bible of Lost Pets
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  15-Apr-09
Extent:  96pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  6 mm
Weight:  144 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  NP
Price:  GBP 8.99
Price:  USD 14.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  WINNER OF THE CRASHAW PRIZE The Bible of Lost Pets is the debut collection of one of America’s celebrated up-and-coming practitioners of the prose poem. Dunham artfully combines vivid, surreal imagery with a fresh, distinctive style to construct strange new parables for our modern times. The themes touched on in these poems are as wide-ranging and surprising as the fantastic cast of characters they employ. Each poem is inimitably portrayed yet somehow manages to render for the reader an insightful glimpse into the bizarre, ironic world they share: our own.

Jamey Dunham’s poetry has appeared in many of the finest journals and magazines of the day and several prominent anthologies, including The Best American Poetry 2005. The assortment of poems that inhabit this collection commingle and conspire to offer up a unique take on postmodern society and the world in which we live. The result is a collection that, as poet Nin Andrews writes, “establishes [Dunham] as one of the accomplished prose poets of the new century.”

Table of contents:
PART ONE
Prairie Dog Town
Go West
A Prayer for Slow-Poke Jackass
The Great Drink of Compassion
Scenes from the Field
The Lemming Parade
Wolf Tickets
In the Desert
Ed's Begonias
Stand-off in the Kitchen of the Angry Sun
Nuclear Winter
The Wolf Union
Wild Night in Urbana, Texas
Autumn Comes to Sugar Creek
Parking is Free on Weekends
Magpies and Orphans
The Widow
Family
The Holidays
Evening Hours
Dusk Falls on the Kitchen
PART TWO
Trickster in the City
Trickster on Hajj
Trickster at the Writers Colony
Trickster at the Free Clinic
Trickster at the Revival
The Man Who Killed Polka
An American Story
The Last Romantic
Another Lemur, Another Story
Urban Myth
The Same Only Lower
Poem with Weasels, c. 1930s (Black and White)
The Park
Return to Your Safe Place
The Zoo
The Bible of Lost Pets
The Neighbor's Dog
The Insomniac Sleepwalking
Watching Jimmy Die
Guilt Comes to Dinner, Stays for Pie
The Confession
After the War
PART THREE
Travels with Bear
Texas Takes a Holiday
Apocalypse-Boogie
Walking the Bat
A Perfect World
The Good Life
Gabby
The Shaman
Finding Jesus
At the Nunnery
A Rabbit for Helga
The Baby-Killing Factory
Blue
The Ripple Effect
Crossing the Equator
Pulling Taffy
The Deer
The Neighborhood
Inside
The Secret Lepidopterist Society
Fate Takes the Scenic Route
Laurie's House
The Man from Texarkana

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Excerpt from book:  

The Lemming Parade

    The apes are mulling about the magazine racks and the rhinoceros are shuffling their feet. Somewhere a building realizes it settled and turns to the bottle. Oh for the lasagna roaster purchased from the gift registry. Oh for the days of dull lawnmower blades. A meerkat and a muskrat are playing pinochle in the park but neither knows the rules, they're just biding time.
     The first snowflake settles to the ground. Then another and another. It's not snow, it's confetti. It's tickertape for the Grand Lemming Parade. See how they fill the streets, see how they celebrate. Up the stairwells, onto the roofs, see how they smile right up to the end. Their tiny tails trailing like comets.

Unpublished endorsement:  Reading The Bible of Lost Pets, I remember why I first fell in love with prose poetry. A magical realist, a satirist, an inventor of parables, Jamey Dunham offers a unique lens through which the absurd appears sensible, and vice versa. These are wonderful prose poems; each one is a gem and each is intricately rendered, sublime, and hauntingly surreal. Reminiscent of Russell Edson, Peter Johnson, and Henri Michaux, the poems vie with harsh realities and yet remain light and magical. In this debut collection Dunham clearly establishes himself as one of the accomplished prose poets of the new century.

Nin Andrews

Unpublished endorsement:  Reading the first line of a Jamey Dunham prose poem is like standing on your toes peering over a cliff, waiting for an inevitable freefall. But don’t expect Dunham to toss you a lifeline. Although he returns the prose poem to its surrealist roots, his images are never random, his narratives never arbitrary. Russell Edson has said that a good poem should “think well,” and Dunham’s poems do exactly that, expecting us to abandon our rational expectations and trust in a very different kind of logic. It’s a wacky journey, but by the time you’ve completed it, you’ll feel like the narrator in Dunham’s “Apocalypse-Boogie,” who, in spite of imminent disaster, sits on a roof with his wife and a “nameless dog,” “feet dangling from a lounge chair,” feeling like the “luckiest man on the face of the earth.”

Peter Johnson

Unpublished endorsement:  The Bible of Lost Pets celebrates a world teeming with life, where anything can happen and does, where man is often a trespasser, and empty space a rarity. In this world “an orphan [has] a flea for a pet” and a paranoid birdwatcher craves reassurance from a nuthatch. Jamey Dunham's “bible” is a zany and moving collaboration by Audobon, Ovid, and Glen Baxter.

Maxine Chernoff

Unpublished endorsement:  If Jamey Dunham is a fabulist, then he is the Anti-Aesop—his lemurs, rats, raccoons, and Coyote no wiser and no more likely to learn than their human partners in business, travel, love. What you get when you accumulate enough stories, fable or not, is a mythology, and Jamey Dunham's mythology is particularly American, particularly now.

Brian Clements

Unpublished endorsement:  Jamey Dunham has penned an inventive collection of fun, unsettling prose poems. His protagonists are prairie dogs, pangolins, orphans, sheriffs, meerkats and more. The Bible of Lost Pets delivers us into a cartoony, furiously morphing world where divisions between animal, vegetable and mineral; animate and inanimate; periods of time, and accepted meanings are absolutely fluid. This is a gospel of giddy slippage, employing gentle send ups of classic literary and movie genre tropes, with each crazy yet meditative detail delivered in tones of calm fatalism.

Amy Gerstler

Unpublished endorsement:  Is it the Russell Edson ape, or the lasagna roaster left by Charles Simic or maybe James Tate in “when the people were children/it sold them ice cream?” Yea, unto the faithful readers of Jamey Dunham’s The Bible of Lost Pets, “Texas Takes a Holiday” and “The Nunnery” are perfect hilarity, perfect solemnity, they are “blue like the other side of a dream.” And much more — beware the man who marries a squirrel and the mice bandits with little sombreros, you’ll want all your prose poems Dunhamed.

Terese Svoboda