Description
Book SynopsisRotary Devotion examines the endangered imagination and the will to sing in chaos. It’s titular motif of ceremonial disorientation moves through individual poems with relentless precision and exhilarating, transformative impact. The poems discover a difficult and necessary beauty in crisis by being themselves as plainly and directly as possible.
Trade Review"Indebted to the great American tradition of Stevens and Ashbery, Gary Keenan's profound and necessary poems are meditations on 'the solace of uncertainty' and 'the work of being born.' Out of 'the slow storm' of existence as 'tulips dry into paper flames,' they "start in pain and end in revelation.' Read them." -- -L. S. Asekoff
Table of ContentsPoint of No Return 5 Materialist Fantasia 6 Dead Rooster 7 Sunlight in the Alleyway 8 Slow Storm 10 Emptiness 12 ii. Entropy: an Ode 14 Fence Factory 15 The Liberation of Melancholy 16 Accommodation Ode 18 Complicity 19 July 4, 1984 20 The Limits to Self-Observation 21 iii. The Rest of the Days of My First Life 23 Portrait of the Ghost of a Flea 25 Improvisation in a Time of Unemployment 26 Absolution 28 Alchemy Alley 29 Landscape with Stuff in the Way 30 iv. Improvisation on a Theft of Light 33 Elegy on the Death of Mark Strand 35 Variable Rates of Change 36 A Common End 38 Just Between You and Me 39 The Light Takes Forever 40 Coda 42
