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From Stephen Elliott
When James Wright said, “I have wasted my life,” Dan Magers must haven taken it to heart. No, Magers’ debut collection, Partyknife, isn’t about golden horse crap. Well, yes it is.
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There is dissonance here between expectation and want, a dichotomy as digestible as life and death, or heaven and earth
Throughout the collection, the speaker in these poems is constantly aware of this contradiction, the intersection between life and art, perhaps frighteningly so, seeking solace in “these few things left,” trying to reconcile, like any reasonable artist, the internal with the external.