Paul Guest

Paul Guest (born in Chattanooga, Tennessee) is an American poet and memoirist.

When he was twelve Paul broke the third and fourth vertebrae in his neck in a bicycle accident, bruising his spinal cord and paralyzing him from the neck down. He is a quadriplegic. He graduated from University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and from Southern Illinois University with an M.F.A. in 1999. He is an assistant professor of Creative Writing at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Virginia.

His poems appear in Harper's, The Paris Review, Tin House, The Kenyon Review, The Missouri Review, Slate and elsewhere.

Full-Length Poetry Collections

a Memoir

To read Paul Guest's poetry is to expect the unexpected, to release oneself to dazzle, to performance, to the hurtle of his images, and the kind of strong emotional shifts that make one marvel at how the poem is able to contain such vast range. It is this quality, this synthesis of images, narratives, humor, and great pain, that calls into question any singular thread a reader might draw from My Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge.

A Paul Guest poem likes to pull out fast in the first line, then zigzag from one eye-opening image to another: A high-speed, innervating trip all the way. The voice is edgy, hip: "In my neoprene monster skin, in my faux city/stormy with hellfire, in my broken/down dollhouse, in my tiny bed/that sleeps my toe, in my souvenir/sombrero, in that noontime shade/badly needed, in my die-cast/Corvette, cherry red, sun bright, comet/fast, in that shrunken hour/I cannot hold on to, in that dwindled dawn. ..."

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