Five / Mitch Highfill

"In these works, Mitch Highfill's writing variously blossoms and explodes: 'Form is alive.' Thinking through the contemporary moment in five complex and demanding sequences, Highfill creates poetry that celebrates quotidian blisses, bewails political stupidity, and draws from a vast range of cultural reference. Highfill's poems are often hilarious, but they also draw from a 'mortal melancholy.' He demonstrates the cost of being keenly attuned (that 'gory nest / of death and rebirth'). Highfill's attentiveness creates a new communitas through manic dismay, lyric anxiety, and assertional imagination. FIVE does the everything that poetry, in its ideal state, aspires to do, manifesting poetry as an 'instrument which is miraculous / and cannot be cured.'"—Elizabeth Robinson
 
126 pages
 
"The wry evanescence of the everyday, where turns of phrase catch whimsey on a vacation (or is it vocation? vacating?): upending the fixed in quest for the space twixt dew and dust. A splash of perception, two shakes of brine, with the sparkle of bitters. Highfill's on a contact high that lasts all morning and way-deep into the night."—Charles Bernstein