Geography of the Forehead
Ron Koertge
978-1-55728-611-6 (paper)
5.5 x 8.5, 82 pages
November 2000
$22.95
About
From short, acerbic lyrics to hilarious prose poems about nutty German professors and Dracula’s teenage girlfriend, readers laugh out loud at simple turns of phrase before they are jerked sober by startling insights into the way we live—and Koertge knows how we live.
Nothing in American culture is safe from the scythe of his irony—not Joan Crawford, not Superman, nor Frank Sinatra. He lampoons our literary heroes and historical giants with the gentlest touch, and we find ourselves grinning before we realize that Koertge is redefining what we thought we knew. His poems are alternately funny or poignantly sad because they are always true, and that truth lingers long after the reading is over.
In Geography of the Forehead, Ron Koertge offers us nearly sixty poems, each a brilliant testament to the human condition. “Though he has been writing his influential and highly original poems for many years,” Charles Harper Webb declares, “he is still something of a secret: a poet of dazzling wit, and surprising sweetness. With this collection, however, the secret is out.”
Author
Ron Koertge lives in Pasadena, California, where he is a professor of English at Pasadena City College. Geography of the Forehead is his fourteenth book of poems.
Praise
“Ron Koertge is not only the wisest, most entertaining wiseguy in American poetry. He is also a conjurer, a designer of verbal holograms. Step inside any of these poems and you enter the precinct of a uniquely playful imagination.”
—Billy Collins, U.S. Poet Laureate, 2002, author of The Apple That Astonished Paris