Cluster of Noisy Planets

Charles Rafferty’s latest collection of prose poems turns philosophical. In A Cluster of Noisy Planets, Rafferty captures the rhythms and patterns of life as a lover, father, and poet, distilling each moment to its essence and grounding them collectively in the wider perspective of a changing world, the constant turning of the stars and the changing seasons of the New England countryside. With a knowing nod to the passage of time—day to day, year to year, epoch to epoch—these lyrical poems form a record of the profound, ephemeral joys, losses, and echoes of commonplace moments.

Praise for Charles Rafferty “Inasmuch as Rafferty writes in a hybrid form—the prose poem—one is obliged to be mindful of those canonical precursors that he engages in the traditional Bloomian agon. Such a contest is akin to Jacob wrestling with the Lord’s angel in the book of Genesis, feeling those terrible sinews tremble like the strains of some unearthly music. One immediately calls to mind not only Poe, Baudelaire, and Rimbaud, but also Georg Trakl, Francis Ponge, and Jean Follain.” — Floyd Collins, The Gettysburg Review “The prose poems in Charles Rafferty’s A Cluster of Noisy Planets, precisely and with great authority, document a world that has fewer stars and more ruins. The poems are artifacts that make a case for us to take a journey down paths where ‘swans are duplicating their grace’ and remind us that the ‘chain we forge is father to the rust.’ That juxtaposition between the beauty which exists in nature and the impermanence of what human beings create, and won’t last, is the nexus where the poems vibrate and reveal, ultimately conveying an urgent call to the reader to see the world and to appreciate what’s left of its fragile beauty.” —Christopher Kennedy, author of Clues from the Animal Kingdom “[Rafferty] always imagines interesting scenarios we can read ourselves into, un-self-indulgently saying something keen about our world in language ‘sharp as broken vodka bottles.’” ―Library Journal

Charles Rafferty is the author of 14 poetry books and chapbooks, most recently The Smoke of Horses (BOA Editions, 2017), Something an Atheist Might Bring Up at a Cocktail Party (Mayapple Press, 2018), and The Problem With Abundance (Grayson Books, 2019). His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, O, Oprah Magazine, The Southern Review, Gettysburg Review, Rhino, Prairie Schooner, and Ploughshares. His stories have been collected in Saturday Night at Magellan’s (Fomite Press, 2013) and Somebody Who Knows Somebody (Gold Wake Press, 2021). He has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism. Currently, he co-directs the MFA program at Albertus Magnus College and teaches in the Westport Writers’ Workshop. He lives in Sandy Hook, CT.