Difficult Joy To pay by check please use this order form. We are pleased to take orders from retailers. Email us with details about your order or call us at 207-837-5760. In Brian Glaser’s third collection, meditations on spirituality and art continue to permeate his work. These poems are organized around the seasons, one cycle of the four seasons and microseasons within them. Difficult Joy focuses on how our ways of relating have changed in deep and perhaps lasting ways. At the center of this collection is a translation of Hölderlin’s “Bread and Wine.” POETRY / General ISBN: 978-1-956056-14-3 (print; softcover; perfect bound) Released December 2021 | Copyright 2021 94 pages |
|
 |
|
|
Brian Glaser was born in Detroit, Michigan, the eldest of two children of Jack Glaser, a theologian, and Mary Ellen Glaser, an educator and social worker. He was educated at the University of California, Berkeley. In 2003, he married dancer and choreographer Melanie Ríos, with whom he has two children, Andoe and John. In 2005, he joined the faculty at Chapman University, where he currently teaches in the department of English. His previous poetry collections, All the Hills and Contradictions, were published by Shanti Arts (2019, 2020). |
|
|
“Brian Glaser’s Hölderlin is perhaps the most beautifully rhythmed version of this long piece to date.” “In Difficult Joy, difficulty means both suffering and labor; and joy, a pleasure in both language and the world. In one poem, a mapless angel searches for home, offering an apt metaphor for the entire collection. Brian Glaser forges new pathways through the dark linguistic wood to home in on the complexity, horror, and, yes, joy of the world.” |
|
|
|
News and Reviews Eric Stinton, “Getting Poetry”: An Interview with Brian Glaser, Brett Ortler, and Craig Santos Perez, Read Everything, January 28 Faculty Books: Difficult Joy by Dr. Brian Glaser, The Voice of Wilkinson, January 7, 2022 |
|
|
|
|
