Hewett is among our most experiential and painstakingly careful poets—drawing inspiration from the grand and the mundane—but he’s really writing about transitions. In poems that are witty, touching, and introspective as well as formally inventive, we find the poet losing his sight, becoming a parent, easing toward middle age with a sense of calm and inevitability.
Greg Hewett is the author of darkacre (Coffee House Press, 2010), The Eros Conspiracy (2006), Red Suburb (2002), andTo Collect the Flesh (New Rivers Press, 1996)—poetry collections that have received a Publishing Triangle Award, two Minnesota Book Award Nominations, a Lambda Book Award Nomination, and an Indie Bound Poetry Top Ten recommendation. The recipient of Fulbright fellowships to Denmark and Norway, Hewett has also been a fellow at the Camargo Foundation in France, and is Professor of English at Carleton College. He is currently finishing a biography of the film noir actor Thomas Gomez.
Reviews
“I was utterly blindsided by Blindsight, so aurally and intellectually seduced by its prime and primal rhythms and organization that I was unprepared for the ferocity of its content, the ‘divine funk’ of its spiraling queer-otics, the shattered mending of its desirousness, and the profundity of its vision of losing vision. If Wallace Stephens’s spirit object was the wilderness-organizing jar in Tennessee, Hewett’s is ‘a condom, unfurled and full,’ which ‘holds dominion over this satellite world.’ Even in this deeply literary collection, Hewett expresses a renegade distrust of the mechanisms of language: ‘Take blindness as metaphor, / you say, but I say / take metaphor as blindness / deforming life to get at / the idea behind life / tires me.’ Always, he seeks the pulse of the unsayable prime beneath words, the visible vision in ‘blindness deep and far.’”—Diane Seuss