Drinks with Dead Poets

Famous poets help a teacher with his writing seminar at a dreamlike university in this metafictional novel from poet Maxwell (One Thousand Nights and Counting). Glyn Maxwell is a writer and professor teaching a class at a remote unnamed college, and every week the poet he is teaching to the class mysteriously shows up to do a reading. Nobody seems to find it odd when Lord Byron and Walt Whitman mysteriously show up on campus—nobody except for Glyn himself, who is trying to figure out how he arrived on campus, where he is exactly, how he ended up teaching this class, and why every day is a Thursday. The author Maxwell blurs the lines between prose and poetry and between fiction and reality as he takes readers on a surreal journey full of literary criticism and metrical analyses, all guided by the visiting poets who speak entirely in quotes from their real-life journals and letters. The surreal quality of the writing is offset by Maxwell’s wonderfully dry sense of humor. Readers of metafiction will enjoy this rabbit hole of luminary poets. (Aug.)