The Cosmopolitan

Ornate miniature travelogues full of adventure and philosophical intrigue.

These poems spin tales of traveling in a world both romantic and politicized, a world miniaturized by globalization and haunted by the figure of the cosmopolitan, who is aware of its saturated history, yet inspired by the knowledge that nostalgia is merely “memory decayed to sugar.” In the kingdom of Stonecipher’s imagination, “a story is always forming to adorn reality” and the fall of the Eastern bloc is reenacted the night “the girl with the DDR bag met the boy with the CCCP T-shirt.”

Publication date: September 1, 2008

Format: Trade Paper

Dimensions: 8 x 9

Page count: 88 pages

ISBN: 9781566892216

Thanks to a 2013 ADA Access Improvement Grant administered by VSA Minnesota for the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, this title is also formatted for screen readers which make text accessible to the blind and visually impaired. To purchase this title for use with a screen reader please email us at info@coffeehousepress.org.

Donna Stonecipher, the author of two previous poetry collections, The Reservoir and Souvenir de Constantinople, also translates poetry and prose from French and German. Her most recent collection is The Cosmopolitan (Coffee House Press, 2008). She grew up in Seattle and Tehran and has lived in New York, Paris, Prague, Iowa City, and Berlin. She is currently studying in Athens, Georgia, and lives part-time in Seattle and Berlin.

“Donna Stonecipher has opened up the prose poem so that it is no longer a box in which one pours their little story. Her writing is full of tenderness, sympathy, and acute observation. Reading The Cosmopolitan is akin to following a bird in flight; it moves at different speeds, dives, rises, rolls, swoops, and floats, and is always something to behold.”

—John Yau, National Poetry Series judge

“Mesmerizing. . . . A dazzling fugue that draws the reader irresistibly in.”

—John Koethe