Life on Earth Format: Hardcover

The second book of an extravagant work-in-progressWhat's JoelGot to do but let the jewelHatchThe light and hookIt to the fleshIt will outlastAnd point the staring womanAt a mirror?--from "The Master Jeweler Joel Rosenthal"Dante's Divine Comedy begins with a journey through Hell and ends in Heaven. Frederick Seidel's trilogy The Cosmos Poems begins in the heavens and descends. Life on Earth is the second book in this trilogy. It includes natural and human history, which are the history of the self, and biography, which is the history of everything else, told in vignettes of beauty, sublimity, horror, and regret.