The Corpse Flower brings works from Bruce Beasley's first four award-winning collections together with twenty-five new poems, organizing them around the metaphor that gives the book its title: an enormous tropical bloom that reeks like carrion, and around whose three-day florescence «dung beetles & flies & sweat bees swarm / . . . pollen gummed all over / their furred feet.» The corpse flower serves as a figure for Beasley's coming to terms with birth and death, fecundity and...
