Sundown ─ Poems New and Selected

The poetry of Floyce Alexander has a great dark undertow one associates with the work of Lorca, Vallejo, and Pablo Neruda. It is erotic, politically charged, humane, sometimes angry, often tender and always seeming to come from deep in the earth, or deep in the history of the human struggle to love in the face of the brutality of systems, the ignorance of mobs, the fragility of the body, and the ordinary luck of the draw. This volume, bringing together work from his eight previous collections, makes clear, at last, the scope of Alexander’s concerns and magnitude of his talent and importance.

Floyce Alexander was born in Arkansas and grew up in Washington State. He attended the University of Washington, where he studied with Theodore Roethke and David Wagoner. He worked as an editor for Washington State University Press in the sixties and was in Mexico City in 1968, when the campesino-student resistance movement culminated in massive violence, an event evoked in his volume Bottom Falling Out of the Dream, and nominated by Gwendolyn Brooks for the Pulitzer Prize. He has an MFA from the University of Massachusetts and a PhD from the University of New Mexico. He lives and writes now in Bimidji, Minnesota.