Robert Fernandez
We Are Pharaoh (2011)
Click here to order We Are Pharaoh or our other titles.
We Are Pharaoh is the debut collection from Robert Fernandez, native of Miami, recipient of a PIP Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative Poetry, and resident of Iowa City. Like a fever or a fire, this book sweeps across our contemporary cultural landscape, setting aglow and surveying its elements, then cataloging the embers.
“In the tragic recognition–(or barbaric imperial yawp?)–of its title, We Are Pharaoh refuses to disavow the poet’s imbrication within the collective nightmare of modernity. Here, Fernandez uncovers the terrible beauty and truth of our first-person plural condition: ‘the voice stark, near-black, mutely blue, a Portland Vase across which cameo jackals tangle.’ This startling work turns a new page on the poetry of our historical moment.”
—Srikanth Reddy
“We Are Pharaoh is a luscious saturnalia of language, adapting New York School painterliness to an erotic tropical sensibility: ‘A mandrill clutching the throat in the billiard hall of Pele.’ Its magic raises the pulse.”
—Ange Mlinko
“Robert Fernandez writes the poetry of a lavish daytime, the record of an inexhaustible world. How generative the gathering of ideas, the assembly of blessings in the form of a visible ‘train from Sharm el-Sheikh,’ where the air gives to each thing an exact place, a name-rhythm, but only for the moment, because myriad possibilities exist to recall."
—Mark McMorris
Click here to read "Hell Me Down" from We Are Pharaoh at the Poetry Society of America's New American Poets feature on Robert.
Click here to read a review of We Are Pharaoh at the HTMLGIANT.
Click here to order We Are Pharaoh or our other titles.
We Are Pharaoh is the debut collection from Robert Fernandez, native of Miami, recipient of a PIP Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative Poetry, and resident of Iowa City. Like a fever or a fire, this book sweeps across our contemporary cultural landscape, setting aglow and surveying its elements, then cataloging the embers.
“In the tragic recognition–(or barbaric imperial yawp?)–of its title, We Are Pharaoh refuses to disavow the poet’s imbrication within the collective nightmare of modernity. Here, Fernandez uncovers the terrible beauty and truth of our first-person plural condition: ‘the voice stark, near-black, mutely blue, a Portland Vase across which cameo jackals tangle.’ This startling work turns a new page on the poetry of our historical moment.”
—Srikanth Reddy
“We Are Pharaoh is a luscious saturnalia of language, adapting New York School painterliness to an erotic tropical sensibility: ‘A mandrill clutching the throat in the billiard hall of Pele.’ Its magic raises the pulse.”
—Ange Mlinko
“Robert Fernandez writes the poetry of a lavish daytime, the record of an inexhaustible world. How generative the gathering of ideas, the assembly of blessings in the form of a visible ‘train from Sharm el-Sheikh,’ where the air gives to each thing an exact place, a name-rhythm, but only for the moment, because myriad possibilities exist to recall."
—Mark McMorris
Click here to read "Hell Me Down" from We Are Pharaoh at the Poetry Society of America's New American Poets feature on Robert.
Click here to read a review of We Are Pharaoh at the HTMLGIANT.