Charles Harper Webb is the author of numerous poetry collections, including Reading the Water, Liver, Tulip Farms and Leper Colonies, Hot Popsicles, Amplified Dog, and Shadow Ball: New and Selected Poems. His poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Best American Poetry, the Pushcart Prize, and Poets of the New Century. Webb has received the Morse Prize, Kate Tufts Discovery Award, Pollak Prize, and Saltman Prize, as well as a Whiting Writer's Award and a Guggenheim fellowship. He is professor of English at California State University, Long Beach, and teaches in the MFA in creative writing program there. (Author photo by Karen Schneider-Webb)
“What Things Are Made Of is a delicious antidote to the solemnities, banalities, and absurdities of our culture, treated by Charles Harper Webb with hilarity and amiability. But lest you be tomfooled into thinking Webb is one of those poets who is all language and no heart, be warned—he also writes some of the best poems of love, sex, childhood, and mortality that we’ve got. I hope Webb enjoyed writing this book as much as I enjoyed reading it.”
—Alicia Suskin Ostriker
“As in a madman’s rickety invention, the silver ball of Charles Harper Webb’s imagination rolls down Egyptian railroad tracks in locomotives powered by burning mummies, until its final moonwalk stage left to the end of nostalgia—where it puts a period to the modern age to which we’re sentenced. It’s a wild ride, and it's over too soon, but for just ten cents you can turn the page and start at the top again. Hilarious, kinetic, profound, Webb’s poems are always a strange and fun adventure. So buy this book, plug in your dime, and get the ball rolling!”
—Tony Barnstone
“Flannery O’Connor said that the best comedy ‘is always about matters of life and death,’ a truth demonstrated masterfully in What Things Are Made Of. With his discerning wit, musician’s ear, and big heart—plus a newly deepened tone of melancholy—Webb takes us on a seriocomic journey down the potholey road from youth to maturity in an age where ‘truth shifts like ants on a Klondike [bar].’ The melancholy is countered by the book’s prevailing motif: love—schmaltz-free—of wife and son, of beleaguered humankind (most of it), of rock ‘n’ roll and fly fishing, of the ‘big band’ of a new day. If you’re looking for a reader friendly work by one of America’s best poets writing at his best, get out your wallet.”
—William Trowbridge
University of Pittsburgh Press
