September Sarabande

A tour-de-force of literary creation, September Sarabande presents all the poems and fiction created by neo-Romantic American poet Brett Rutherford in the twelve months of 2022. Along with the usual bizarre and Gothic creations of this Pittsburgh-based poet, the 209 poems also trace in biting satire the year of COVID, the Giant Insane Baby Ex-President, and looming mass extinctions. Placed here in the order written, the poems span settings as diverse as rural Pennsylvania, Revolutionary Russia, Tang Dynasty China, and New York City. The speaking voice can be The Emperor of China, a centipede living beneath a carpet, a solitary oak leaf in Crimea, or a librarian in ancient Alexandria. Three poem-cycles adapt and expand the writings of poets whose works are seldom seen in English: the witty Eros-obsessed Greeks Callimachus and Meleager, and Li Yu, the exiled and doomed last Emperor of Southern Tang, whose poems are counted as the saddest things ever written in the Chinese language. Rutherford enfolds the originals into narrative cycles that portray each classic poet in his times, yet makes each work speak with new meaning for our times.
This volume also includes four supernatural sketches about a First World War succubus, Edgar Poe's encounter with a graveyard specter, a childhood encounter with the legendary Jewish Golem, and the confessions of Dr. Frankenstein's hunchback assistant. These compressed narratives are akin to European supernatural sketches like those of Ludwig Tieck from the Romantic era.
Finally, more than 180 Facebook diary entries trace the poet's everyday life and writing, with ideas and rants shared online with his friends. As a journal of living through a time of epidemic and dreadful politics, this casts light on some of the poems and what prompted them. Rutherford's engagement with film, classic literature, classical music, poetry publishing, and his Pittsburgh environs, all shine through.
This is the 315th publication of The Poet's Press.