In accessible poems full of rich detail and painterly images, Maura
Stanton looks under the surface of the ordinary, hoping to find the
magic spark below the visible. In poems both humorous and elegaic, she
gathers strange facts, odd events, and overlooked stories to construct
her own vision of immortality, one made up of fragments of history and
geography and the illusions of yearning human beings. From elephants in
Ceylon to Nazi prisoners in Ireland, from Beowulf to Jane Austen, from
sonnets to prose poems to blank verse, Immortal Sofa conjures our
complex existence in all its sorrowful but astonishing variety.