Applause: Poems

Carol Muske-Dukes

qer 2014 · Open Road Media

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National Book Award finalist Carol Muske-Dukes explores joy, dread, and the solitary communion of applause

Applause provides twenty vivid and evocative poems by Carol Muske-Dukes. In “Dream,” she seeks the past in reverie, along with bicoastal riffs on New York City and Los Angeles. “The Eulogy” paints the scene of a funeral in sunny California where a young man who has died of AIDS is laid to rest. In the title poem, a twelve-part journey through the ritual of applause, Muske-Dukes examines the power of a gesture—clapping—to transform oneself from individual to communal. “What a strange phenomenon,” she says, “to be single and plural at once, to feel joy and dread simultaneously, to wish to acknowledge publicly one’s anonymity.”

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Carol Muske-Dukes is the author of eight books of poems, four novels, and two essay collections, and is an editor of two anthologies, including Crossing State Lines: An American Renga, which she coedited with Bob Holman. Many of her books have been New York Times Notable selections. Muske-Dukes is a professor of English and creative writing at the University of Southern California, where she founded the PhD program in creative writing and literature, and she recently fulfilled her appointment as poet laureate of California, appointed by the governor’s office. Her poetry collection Sparrow was a National Book Award finalist and she is a six-time Pushcart Prize winner. She writes for the New York Times Book Review and the New York Times op-ed page, the Los Angeles Times, the Huffington Post, and the New Yorker’s Page-Turner blog. Her poems have been published and anthologized widely, including in several editions of Best American Poetry. Muske-Dukes has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, a Library of Congress award, Barnes & Noble’s Writer for Writers Award, and many other honors. She lives in Southern California and New York.