Sunset Gun

Dorothy Parker's verse cuts deeper than its elegant metrics suggest. Written during the Jazz Age but untouched by its frivolity, these poems capture something truer about love, loss, and the particular loneliness of being clever in a world that values warmth over wit. Parker had a gift for turning the epigram into an elegy, for making the couplet feel like a confession whispered across a crowded room. The title itself, Sunset Gun, suggests the day's end, the surrender of light, the small ceremonial violence of closing. Many of these pieces first appeared in the New Yorker, the Nation, and the Yale Review, assembled here as a portrait of a woman who could make a sonnet about a bad date feel like an autopsy of the soul. For readers who prefer their poetry with a side of poison and a twist of lime.