Unknown Friends by Carl Dennis

Unknown Friends by Carl Dennis

Carl Dennis has become one of the most important American poets writing today. Unknown Friends, his tenth book, is about separation and connection, about actual friends we can never know fully and friends never met who are summoned into existence through the efforts of an imagination that insists on dialogue. While accepting our ignorance as inevitable, the poems work to expand the notion of what it means to be part of a community larger than any we can comprehend, both a community given to us by history and one outside of history through which the world of experience is nurtured and sustained.

Carl Dennis is the author of nine collections of poetry, the most recent of which, Practical Gods, won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2001. He has received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, and in 2000 he was awarded the Ruth Lilly Award for his contribution to American poetry by Poetry Magazine and the Modern Poetry Association. He is a part-time faculty member of Warren Wilson College's MFA program in creative writing and teaches in the English Department at the State University of New York at Buffalo.