COMING IN APRIL 2027
Purchase Where Thoughts Come From Here
THIS IS A PRE-SALE BOOKS WILL BE SHIPPED IN APRIL 2027
“Cutting edges / having always been an inspiration,” Steven Cramer writes in the very first poem (ironically titled “Coda”) in this, after eight books, his first collection of new and selected poems. I admire all of Cramer’s books and find throughout his work the striking surprises, the strangeness, and, yes, the cutting edges that I too crave in poetry. His poems continue to reveal his urgent sensitivity to the human condition and an uncanny emotional accessibility. They’re intelligent without being merely intellectual, and always thoughtfully gauged in form and structure beyond being merely “well-made.” Even his earliest poems had a rare freshness (in all senses of the word)—touching and comic, erotic and elegiac—sometimes all at once. I’m happy to see so many of Cramer’s early poems come so vividly alive again in this generous selection from each of his previous books. And the two rich sections of new poems are if anything even more deeply memorable. Here’s a book both new and old that demands and rewards our full attention and that genuinely earns our unqualified celebration.
—Lloyd Schwartz
About the Author
Steven Cramer is the author of eight poetry collections, including The Eye that Desires to Look Upward (1987); The World Book (1992); Dialogue for the Left and Right Hand (1997); Goodbye to the Orchard (2004), which won the 2005 Sheila Motton Prize from the New England Poetry Club, and was named a 2005 Honor Book in Poetry by the Massachusetts Center for the Book; Clangings (2012); Listen (2020); and Departures from Rilke (2023). A chapbook, As If: Variations on Enrique Anderson-Imbert, was published in 2025 by Lily Poetry Review Press, which will publish Where Thoughts Come From: New and Selected Poems, in April 2027.
Steven’s poems and criticism have appeared in numerous literary journals, including The Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, The New Republic, The Paris Review, Partisan Review, Poetry, and Triquarterly; as well as in The Autumn House Anthology of Contemporary American Poets and The POETRY Anthology, 1912–2002.
Steven has taught literature and writing at Bennington College, Boston University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Tufts University. Recipient of two grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, he founded the Low-Residency MFA Program in Creative Writing at Lesley University in Cambridge.
Steven’s essay, “Merwin’s Evolving Protocols: On the Occasion of ‘The Day Itself,’” appears in Until Everything Is Continuous Again: American Poets on the Recent Work of W. S. Merwin (WordFarm, 2012). Cramer’s work is also represented in Villanelles (Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets Series, 2012).
CONTACT
To schedule an event or to send a message to Steven, please send an e-mail to scramer@lesley.edu.
To send a message to the publisher or author you may send an email to wherethoughtscomefromlpr@gmail.com