Catastrophes and Trophies This collection is actually the combination and slight rearrangement of four separate volumes of verse; almost all of these poems were written in the calendar year 2001. It's not much to show for a year of human life-- that rich mystery we are twisted into by such a resolute hand. The main emphasis of this collection (as I hope will be quite clear) is Nature. Nature and Naturalism are not quite the same thing, however, and I have always had my own disagreements with the various proponents of those who took too dogmatically Thoreau's painful premise "Simplify, simplify, simplify." The sub-title is "inner nature poems," and that is to help show that the weather for humans is never merely a matter of what's over our heads-- it's what's in our hearts as well. --from the Introduction

The essays from the pen of Daniel Weeks in A More Prosaic Light range from social and political commentary to literary criticism and reminiscences about the literary and cultural scene on the Jersey Shore. Weeks tackles topics as diverse as Hollywood movies, middle school jitters, Thanksgiving, the dying fishing industry in New Jersey, Edison's phonograph, heat waves, the great Englishtown Auction, Romantic poetry, and the elusive American Dream. Weeks's literary essays also range widely from the poets of the British canon-Coleridge, Keats, and Yeats-to American moderns and contemporaries-Amiri Baraka, Charles Olson, Robert Pinsky, and Louise Gluck. The essays and reviews here are interspersed with Weeks's reminiscences of his encounters with various writers, which provide an entertaining inside view of the literary scene on the Jersey Shore during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries."