The Face: A Novella in Verse

David St. John is among the most innovative and accomplished poets writing today. In crafting The Face, a daring book-length sequence of poems, he has created a highly original novella in verse.

The poems evoke the disintegration of a man as he confronts the failure of love and descends into a hellish dark night of the soul. They explore the drama of the shattered self in a variety of voices, calling on memory to speak and imagination to make beauty from the shards. Slowly the speaker reassembles his life and finds a new faith in himself and in the world. David St. John's poems reveal a swirling cinematic poetry of visionary scope -- meditative and confessional in some moments, ironic and playful in others.

Deeply passionate and raw in its candor, The Face may be for this generation of poets what Robert Lowell's Life Studies and John Ashbery's Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror were for theirs.