Description
Book SynopsisWinner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, Susan Gubernat’s The Zoo at Nightreflects with subtle craft on the dark side of love, death, the family romance, carnality, and lofty aspirations. She thinks of her poems as “night thoughts” resembling nocturnes, in which “a bit of light leaks in.”
Both experimental and classic, Gubernat’s poems combine formal and free verse elements. A(mostly) unrhymed sonnet sequenceseeksto recall the world of apre-digital childhood when physical objects—tactile, mechanical—took on totemic import andmagical significance. Otherpoems echo the Rilkean principle that poetry can be empathetic by looking outward at the “thingness” of the world.
In these works of love and longing, Gubernat enters through the doors of craftand exits with feeling.
Trade Review"Rising out of experience—painful, beautiful, disruptive—
The Zoo at Night offers an unflinching look at an imperfect world underlain with a conviction to hope."—Lisa Higgs,
Kenyon Review“‘Beauty is always strange,’ says Baudelaire, and in Susan Gubernat’s brilliant
The Zoo at Night, we have a grand tour of the many ways that the world, arriving directly under our noses, can remain, everlastingly, embodied and mysterious.”—Mark Svenvold, author of
Empire Burlesque and
Big Weather “For those of us who believe in words—their merit as instruments of inquiry, their aptitude for beauty, their power of linking soul to soul—these are difficult times. Open these pages, and find your hope restored. Susan Gubernat’s are poems of meticulous craftsmanship, luminous apprehension, and unfailing heart. I’m grateful beyond measure for this book.”—Linda Gregerson, author of
Magnetic North, finalist for the National Book Award
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
I
Etruscans
Wedding Cookies
The Right Hand of Goltzius
I Was in Gym Class When Cronkite Said They’d Shot Him
Sharing a Birthday with Mata Hari
Atlantic City
Smart Enough
The Roosevelt
Christmas Fires
Winter Coats
After the Abortion
Shaggy Parasol
II
Analog House: A Cabinet of Curiosities
The Singer
Easter Bread
Hades
Doberman
Meat Grinder
Piano Bench
13th Fairy
Washboard
Clothesline
Feather Duster
Spirit Level
Paint-by-Number
Net
Netting
Hats, Purses, Gloves
Vestibule
Deliberate Happiness
Photo on Pony
Underwood in Flames
III
The Zoo at Night (1)
Aphasia of the Moon
Sick Child
Filia
Poster Children
La Sebastiana
Portrait at Fourteen
Ground Time
No Warrior
The Collective
Deathbed Proof
Day Lilies
IV
The Zoo at Night (2)
The Entrance of Beauty
Yellow Sweater
Too Soon
On a Scale Of
Fonder
My Sister and I Are Having the Same Dream
Reading Loop: The Sibyl at Cumae
Mating Dance
Prey
Eclipse
The Buddhas of Bamiyan
Our Road
V
“Report a Problem with This Poem”
“Beautiful Contrivances” in the Sex Life of Orchids
Fumée d’Ambre Gris
The Fascicles of Emily Dickinson
My Mother in the Eye of the Storm
Blue Tooth
Ground Note
Near Capitol Reef, Utah
Pears in Winter
Notes
