The History Hotel

Reviews / Votes

"The History Hotel carries a mixture of quiet humor and hard-nosed insight. There's little decoration here, no fluff to deflect our attention from what we know that we know-just the energetic presence of Wormser's consistently cool, keen sensibility that is both bewildered and wise. It's easy to forget the good work words can do. Line by line, these poems resuscitate our weathered, better selves and the ability to see beyond the lurid surfaces that slowly but surely overwhelm our lives. If the current times offer us a steady stream of absurdities, if we intend to hold onto a sense of compassion while trying to make a sensible way through these days, The History Hotel has cleared a rough path for us." * Tim Seibles, author of 'Fast Animal' and 'One Turn Around the Sun' * "'Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate,' wrote Shakespeare, and in The History Hotel Wormser does just that, beholding the world's weariness with a thousand-yard stare and an eloquence that can spit nails or rain feathers. These all-too-aware poems have something sanguine to report: amid the soul-flattening wreckage of 'greedy nations,' somehow there is still amorous folly, chatter, longing, picnics in graveyards, childhood, and art. The History Hotel feels like poetry written at the event horizon of a black hole, in the stark light of a Hopper painting." * Diana Goetsch, author of 'This Body I Wore' * "Wormser is a master wizard of world poetry and his stories in The History Hotel will frighten and exhilarate you while serving their forbidden and diabolic fruit. Wormser is writing here beyond the best of his already celebrated powers established early in his career with the American classic The White Words. In these new poems, each one a multi-faceted diamond of irony, pathos, nostalgia, wit, and wisdom, Wormser is riotously and painfully funny as the world teeters on its axis and hurtles towards oblivion, observing in 'Ode to the Stock Exchange' 'that the earth was the cash / machine of the universe awaiting travelers from / other galaxies in need of a loan.' In his elegy for the great Polish poet Zagajewski-and reading Wormser we enter a landscape smoldering after bombing, or hurtling on its own blind volition-Wormser finds a way to acknowledge the positive side of the two-faced coin and contradiction of human action; 'Thank you, you said to Life / and somewhat remarkably she thanked you back.' In this glorious volume written at the tail end of a comet sweeping dangerously close to earth, Wormser is building a house for today's inclement weather, thanking life in line after line for the chance to comment on the follies of its self-deluded and failed human stewards." * Indran Amirthanayagam, author of 'Ten Thousand Steps Against the Tyrant' * "The History Hotel is philosophical and charming, the work of a master poet that serenely takes the long view of life hope and despair swirled together." * The Lake * "Accomplished poetic craft has been a hallmark of Wormser's poetry through more than four decades, and those who fear that the art's traditional virtues-form, assonance, rhythm, deft rhyme-are endangered species will find them alive and well here." * The Manhattan Review *