Sudden Eden

The essays in Sudden Eden explore the ways in which the memory of Paradise, or experience of the paradisiacal, has shaped canons of experimental writing from the late Middle Ages through to the present day. Keyed to figures as various as Dante and Beckett, Thomas Traherne and Barbara Guest, Sudden Eden proposes a new constellation of Metaphysical, Symbolist, and Postmodern lights—a single, continuous Heaven. 

DONALD REVELL is the author of fifteen collections of poetry, most recently of The English Boat (2018) and Drought-Adapted Vine (2015), both from Alice James books, Revell has also published six volumes of translations from the French, including Apollinaire’s Alcools, Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell, Laforgue’s Last Poems, and Verlaine’s Songs without Words. His critical writings have been collected as Essay: A Critical Memoir; The Art of Attention; and Invisible Green: Selected Prose. Winner of the PEN USA Translation Award and two-time winner of the PEN USA Award for Poetry, he has also won The Academy of American Poets’ Lenore Marshall Prize and is a former Fellow of the Ingram Merrill and Guggenheim Foundations. Additionally, he has been twice awarded Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. Having previously taught at the universities of Alabama, Denver, Iowa, Missouri, Tennessee and Utah, Donald Revell is currently Professor of English at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.