Cities at Dawn

By Geoffrey Nutter

• Description
• Reviews

• Lush, surreal, cinematic, and imagistically precise, Geoffrey Nutter paints the world into his fifth collection of poems. His poems display a consciousness in awe of all matter, be it organic, mechanical, industrial, ornithological, or sartorial. Iridescent and sparkling, his poems are ornate wonders of language, each their own contained ecosystem and civilization.
  

• Nutter’s poetry, time and time again, reminds us of our slow divorce from objective reality whose physical resistance to human desire we have always relied upon for proper development. If his poetry infuriates us (and it can; it does), it’s not so much due to its confection but because it relentlessly shows us a world we never really got to know, that makes his poetry so sweet. His poems are full of things that proudly stand distinct from us (e.g., a freight car, maps, statues, steel domes, cigars, steeples, and on and on) as if to remind us that our reply to nature was once to negotiate with it, imagine into it, not replace it. . . . For years now, Nutter has been quietly writing some of the most beautiful poems in America.
  John Ebersole, Kenyon Review

  Though its tone is almost always calmly descriptive, whatever it describes is always somehow something else and not itself.
  Barry Schwabsky, Hyperallergic

  In audacious lushness, Geoffrey Nutter's Cities at Dawn delivers layers upon layers of detail that are refreshing in the face of contemporary poetic trends.
  Natalie Tomlin, Newpages

  These poems are the multi-angled jewels whose light is derived from the fragments Nutter calls out directly.
  Greg Bem, Yellow Rabbits