Charles Harper Webb is the author of numerous poetry collections, including Reading the Water, Liver, Tulip Farms and Leper Colonies, Hot Popsicles, Amplified Dog, and Shadow Ball: New and Selected Poems. His poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Best American Poetry, the Pushcart Prize, and Poets of the New Century. Webb has received the Morse Prize, Kate Tufts Discovery Award, Pollak Prize, and Saltman Prize, as well as a Whiting Writer's Award and a Guggenheim fellowship. He is professor of English at California State University, Long Beach, and teaches in the MFA in creative writing program there.
What Things Are Made Of is a delicious antidote to the
solemnities, banalities, and absurdities of our culture, treated by
Charles Harper Webb with hilarity and amiability. But lest you be
tomfooled into thinking Webb is one of those poets who is all
language and no heart, be warned-he also writes some of the best
poems of love, sex, childhood, and mortality that we've got."" -
Alicia Suskin Ostriker
""As in a madman's rickety invention, the silver ball of Charles
Harper Webb's imagination rolls down Egyptian railroad tracks in
locomotives powered by burning mummies, until its final moonwalk
stage left to the end of nostalgia-where it puts a period to the
modern age to which we're sentenced. It's a wild ride, and it's
over too soon, but for just ten cents you can turn the page and
start at the top again. Hilarious, kinetic, profound, Webb's poems
are always a strange and fun adventure. So buy this book, plug in
your dime, and get the ball rolling!"" - Tony Barnstone
""Flannery O'Connor said that the best comedy 'is always about
matters of life and death,' a truth demonstrated masterfully in
What Things Are Made Of. With his discerning wit, musician's
ear, and big heart-plus a newly deepened tone of melancholy-Webb
takes us on a seriocomic journey down the potholey road from youth
to maturity in an age where 'truth' shifts like ants on a Klondike
[bar].' The melancholy is countered by the book's prevailing motif:
love-schmaltz-free-of wife and son, of beleaguered humankind (most
of it), of rock 'n' roll and fly fishing, of the 'big band' of a
new day. If you're looking for a reader friendly work by one of
America's best poets writing at his best, get out your wallet."" -
William Trowbridge
""Twelve years ago when I first plucked Webb's Liver from
the crush it pinned me to the carpet of the bookstore aisle. Books
later, here I am on his planet of What Things Are Made Of,
spelunking the Dickeyville Grotto, 'Bimbo Limbo,' and Andy's
Texaco. Webb's Things-crafted from a recombinant cynical
romanticism that dreams with one eye open-groan and growl out of
the 'cracked crankcase' of his wildness. Dare, dear reader, to
harness yourself to this bungee jump that-anguished, masterful, and
still deeply funny on the hundredth reading-will dangle you over
the precipice, where you will get an eyeful, an earful, and have a
polyphonic three-bone time. Webb's gift won't let you down."" -
Roger Weingarten
""Webb swerves effortlessly between humor and the sort of
introspection that we all must feel from time to time. . . . [he]
is spectacular at the funnier side of life. Who can't identify with
the confounding way memory works, jettisoning knowledge in favor of
trivia?"" - Press-Telegram (Long Beach, CA)
""Webb displays such a wonderfully quirky, idiosyncratic voice,
whether writing about oil-slicked, doomed penguins or puppy love.
His poems careen between wild hyperboles, the irony of looking back
at youthful indiscretions and unrequited or disappointed love, to
the joy he feels with his beloved small son and wife, and his love
of old rock bands like the Stones or Led Zeppelin. But there's
always something interesting, fascinating in this collection,
something that makes us read and keep turning the pages, to see
what new and deliriously strange take he'll have on the things of
this world."" - Chamber Four
""Metaphors of startling aptness and originality, a voice at once
endearing and provocative, high musicality, propulsive energy, wild
imaginative leaps, as well as mastery of diction from lyricism to
street-speak, create a reading experience of the first order.
Uniformly fun to read, these poems go down easy, but pack a wallop
. . . I laughed, I cried, and I spent time mulling over his lines
for days."" - Reading Room Book Reviews
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