Description
Book SynopsisPoetry from an especially deft magician of words. This latest book of wonders from Nancy Naomi Carlson fixes upon one of the few defenses we have to confront the body’s betrayals—our words. Though in the end, even the world’s last word “forgets its name . . . has no word for this forgetting.” At once vulnerable and open, tempered and tempted equally by the erotic and the empathic, such dualities limn these affectingly beautiful and lyrical poems. Carlson’s lines, entreating as Scheherazade, “weave chords / into tales within tales, whirlpools within seas” to save her life. Indeed, music has no need for voice or harp, as “in anechoic chambers, you become / the only instrument of your worldly sounds,” echoing Mozart’s credo “that music lies / in the silence between notes.” In a world scarred by pandemics, wars, and violent tribalism, the givens are gone—“talismans we clung to, believing / we might be spared in some way / by marking our doors / with our own sacrificial blood.” In these unflinching free and formal verse poems, Carlson seduces us with the promise of the joy yet to be had, were we to look in the right places.
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Table of ContentsI
(Sub)Contexts
The Last Word
An Excess of Dreaming
The Half-Life of Memory
Translating the Body
Coming To
Sequelae
Calder’s Menagerie
Lockdown Aubade on Rimsky-Korsakov’s Birthday
[Everything in nature contains its violence]
Vigilance
Painted Moon
How Skies Fall
Inward Looking
Feast of Tabernacles
Small Griefs
After I Swallowed the Willow Tree
Translating the Dead
II
Three Years Post-Chemo
Mannequin Head
Quarantine: Day 40
Tintoretto Blues
Day 166
Viva the Vagus
Aubade: Day 50
On the Fourth Platonic Virtue
Out of an Absence of Caution
After I Xeroxed the Sky
My Goyishe Ex-Husband
[If soil can resurrect daffodils]
Forever-Bound
Good Sense
Decreation
This Life We Follow
Why Sturgeon Leap
III
By Any Other Name
Ode for Three Exes
Still Life in Orange
Ant Hills
In Defense of Polyamory
Bookends
Etiology
Trisomy
Dog Star
In Other Words
We Weren’t So Jewish Then
The Graffiti Artist
Odalisque
Sequoia
Nocturne
Corpse Flower
Finding/Keeping the Beat
