Sunbathing on Tyrone Power's Grave
Death has never felt so alive in this “bold and sexy and smart” collection of poems (Stephen Dunn).
From alluring titles to haunting last lines, the poems in Kim Dower’s fourth collection soothe, terrify, and always surprise, revealing the extraordinary within the ordinary. Acclaimed for combining the accessible and profound, humor and heartache, Dower’s poetry continues to be quirky, dark, sexy, disarmingly candid, and moving, and here she explores the landscape of death and its intersections with love, longing, obsession, sadness, joy, and beauty.
Wise and soaring, these poems bravely imagine another life beyond the one we all know, where even the angels surrounding the graves are wearing bikinis, smoking Kool Lights.
Kim Dower
Kim (Freilich) Dower, originally from New York City, received a BFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College, where she also taught creative writing. She has published three collections of poetry, all from Red Hen Press: Air Kissing on Mars (2010) which was on the Poetry Foundation’s Contemporary Best Sellers list and described by the Los Angeles Times as “sensual and evocative . . . seamlessly combining humor and heartache,” Slice of Moon (2013) “unexpected and sublime” by O magazine, and Last Train to the Missing Planet(2016) “full of worldly, humorous insights into life as it is,” says Janet Fitch. Kim’s work has been nominated for two Pushcart Prize and has been featured in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day, Garrison Keillor's The Writer's Almanac, and Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry, as well as in Ploughshares, Barrow Street, Rattle, and Eclipse. Her poems are included in several anthologies, including, Wide Awake: Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond (Beyond Baroque Books/Pacific Coast Poetry Series, 2015) and Coiled Serpent: Poets Arising from the Cultural Quakes & Shifts of Los Angeles (Tia Chucha Press). She teaches Poetry and Dreaming in the B.A. Program of Antioch University. Kim was City Poet Laureate of West Hollywood, California from October 2016—October 2018.
