Description

About the Author

John Koethe is distinguished professor of philosophy emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and the first Poet Laureate of Milwaukee. His collections include Falling Water, which won the Kingsley-Tufts Award, North Point North, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and Ninety-fifth Street, winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize. In 2011, he received a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Praise for ROTC Kills: Poems…

“In this ninth collection of poems, very much obsessed with time’s passage and its ending, with aging, remembering and preparing to die, poet-philosopher Koethe is in full, lucid command of his voice, an amiable hybrid of late Wallace Stevens, late John Ashbery, and William Bronk.”
-Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Koethe’s winding syntax with its sudden, animating insights is like the clear, radiant path of a sunbeam; he illuminates another life inside our lives--the generous and capacious life of hte imagination that is his true province and home.”
-Susan Stewart, author of COLUMBARIUM and RED ROVER

“John Koethe’s poems in which he describes his past are more than simple memorials or langurous retrievals; rather, they are profound meditations on time and the curious hold it has on the human psyche.”
-American Academy of Arts and Letters

“Koethe is a beautiful writer, one whose subtle inventiveness can give new life to persistent images, nail a complex feeling in just a few words, or make the basic tools of the poetic trade into sources of pleasure and persuasion.”
-Slate

“Koethe . . . might be unmatched in the manner in which he thinks in his poems. Or, more than thinks, he meditates. He dramatizes the emotional vitality of an idea which nowadays is strangely and sadly rare.”
-The Rumpus

“He handles big themes deftly, like the professional philosopher he is. . . . The poet seems comfortable with uncomfortable insights; readers may take comfort in Koethe’s lyric musings.”
-Booklist

“I can think of no one whose company I’d rather keep-for Koethe writes in the water of his time, knowing all is temporary.”
-Washington Independent Review of Books