Translations from the Flesh - Paperback

by Elton Glaser (Author)

Translations from the Flesh, Elton Glaser's seventh full-length collection of poetry, is driven by the powerful engines of love and desire. In poems long and brief, playful and intense, Glaser evokes what it feels like "to fall into / Love and its infinite mistakes." In a style that might be described as "flamboyant stoicism" (a phrase from Simon Callow, ) he explores our human urgencies and weaknesses, following wherever our appetites lead us, whether hormonal or spiritual, cravings that we struggle to understand. The voice that says "Apprentice me to mysteries of the flesh" speaks for everyone intent on making sense of the body's restless yearning for fulfillment. These poems, with their witty brio and passionate precision of language, agree with Gerald Stern that "the brain / is the best organ for love." At the same time, they are not afraid to get down in the dirt, among the more primitive pleasures. Whatever their bent, from moony aspirations to "rare positions only the wicked know," the poems express Glaser's mission to give voice to those deep pressures that move us, body and soul: "I put my native tongue / To work, open to / The dark instincts of ecstasy."

Author Biography

Elton Glaser, a native of New Orleans, is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Akron, where he also directed the University of Akron Press and edited the Akron Series in Poetry. Glaser has published ten full-length collections of poetry, most recently Soul Patch, winner of the 2025 Off the Grid Poetry Prize. With William Greenway, he coedited I Have My Own Song for It: Modern Poems of Ohio (Akron, 2002). Among his awards are fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Ohio Arts Council, the Iowa Poetry Award, the Crab Orchard Poetry Award, and the Miller Williams Arkansas Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in the 1995, 1997, and 2000 editions of The Best American Poetry. He has also won a Pushcart Prize.