The Interlude

Poems by D. W. Fenza

“D. W. Fenza’s The Interlude is a spectacular achievement. This meditation on the conflicting desires of the spirit and the flesh takes the colapse of marriage as its narrative arc; yet, like a rainbow’s, this arc illuminates an elaborate spectrum—a dazzling palette of artistic, social, and intellectual concerns. Here, in The Interlude, the mirroring gyres of decline and ascension reflect the blunt intrusions of experience upon the act of art, as well as admitting the true urgency of art in the shape of a life. Milton and Wordsworth perform as the presiding shades in this remarkable poem, and the twice-fallen angels who populate this book inevitably begin to wear the faces we recognize as those continually passing through each of our own daily lives”

—David St. John

“D. W. Fenza, in this book-length poem, The Interlude, seeks a balance between the overriding materialism of daily life and the poet’s natural desire for artistic and spiritual transcendence … The questions the book poses are deeply felt, by turns meditative, ironic, self-distancing and passionate, and especially relevant to the concerns of Fenza’s own generation, a generation coming to age in a time of great narcissism and conservatism.”

—Elizabeth Spires

“… this book goes a long way toward introducing a necessary new sense of responsibility and morality to literature.”

—Robert McDowell