The Age of Discovery is a devastating take on the ways we stave off panic. Mythic, precise as a statistician, Alan Michael Parker eyes the virtual data, “bottomless as coffee”; the culture, on the cusp of cancellation. (“I love you more with every hit,” he writes, both acknowledgment and threat.) Parker lays bare the limits of nostalgia, where “the boarded-up video store / makes sadness look pretty”—the farce that art transforms, and the truth of it, too. In The Age of Discovery, Alan Michael Parker, line by startling line, has written a wry, deeply humane collection for our uncivil age.
—Randall Mann
With The Age of Discovery, Alan Michael Parker locates a new register. Throughout this collection are poems that resonate with humor blending through heartbreak, that sound this poet’s singular voice, and that, ultimately, sustain with Parker’s signature, enviable imagination.
—Jon Pineda, Little Anodynes and Let’s No One Get Hurt