The Unsubscriber: Poems

Eavesdroppers fear
the hermit's soliloquy.

Wake up, wound, the knife said.
--from "To Live By"

Bill Knott's poetic manner--surreal yet vernacular, outrageous and tender--is unlike anything in contemporary American verse. In The Unsubscriber, he investigates cloning laboratories and spaceships, cemeteries and battlefields, talks to Damocles and pokes fun at Hamlet, witnesses the moments before a seduction, and charts maps in the stars and in forests. Knott tells fables, poses questions, shadows spies, and breathes new life into poetry's oldest stories: love and war. The Unsubscriber is the first new book in a decade by a fiercely iconoclastic American poet deserving of a wide audience.