Arks & Convenants

Arks & Covenants: Essays and Aphorisms
by Alfred Corn

Cat in the Sun Books, 2017
(pub reDUX)

This third collection of essays by the poet and novelist Alfred Corn is wide-ranging in scope and unusual in its approach. Corn brings the insider’s understanding of how meaning arises and develops in a literary work and provides close readings of authors as distinct as the author of Deuteronomy, Thom Gunn, Elizabeth Bishop, Cavafy and Wallace Stevens. The book also includes a series of aphorisms that make keenly ironic comments on moral and artistic issues. There are readers, too, who will enjoy the grace and clarity of Corn’s prose style. An Afterword by the distinguished critic Robert Archambeau provides that same pleasure. This unusual edition comes with a cover portrait of Alfred Corn by artist Stephanie Rose, who uses details from it as design elements throughout the book.