Honest James by Christian Schlegel

For international orders, please visit our distributor, here. With setting moons, talking tulips, and the peacefulness found in a horse’s mane, the poems in Christian Schlegel’s debut collection Honest James might be as difficult to describe as the layered notes of an ancient perfume. “A famous notion twirled and froze. I made it mine. / Again it twirled.” This unabashedly lyrical collection, which never shies away from rhyme, includes various cameos, including Goethe in its second section, with the end result being what John Ashbery calls “one of the strangest books of poetry to come along in some time.”“In Christian Schlegel’s Honest James you’ll find literary mannerism lightly wielded, gesture for its own sake, a bit of lace at the cuff. The title—a reference to Wordsworth’s Prelude—reflects the antiquing and old world light in these pages. Schlegel knits his syntax to invite the savor of the micro-novelistic vignettes he evokes. Period mood is produced with snippets of Latin and G