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Couldn't Prove, Had to Promise
By Wyatt Prunty
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Description
In "Crescent Theater, Schenectady, NY," a silent-movie accompanist reads his foreign newspaper after work as he listens, ever the outsider, "to his children using English / For everything they wish." In "Rules," a small girl, told she can't go to the school nurse "every time some bad thing happens," plaintively wonders, "Where do you go?" And in "Making Frankenstein," a boy who has cajoled his parents into letting him see The Curse of Frankenstein wakes to a nightmare. His father bans horror films as "too anatomical"; "What's anatomical?" the boy wonders. Given a book that catalogs diseases, the worst of which come "from intimate contact," he is horrified by his father's explanation of grownup intimacy: "That's how you made your way into this world."
Moving from a wry portrait of a husband-musing on mortality-whose Christmas tie lands in the gravy, to "Reading the Map," which grapples with the cartography of love, to "ad lib," a farewell that redefines farewell, these poems burnish the small triumphs and fears that fill our daily lives with humor and pathos. The book closes with a long, four-part poem, "Nod," which transports readers to a parking lot in July: an asphalt-as-inferno where Cain the cracker, or adversary-as-initiator, the pleuritic voice of disappointment, names the ways inversion makes a lie reliable and works people best as, like a joke or discount price, "It makes you feel you're getting more by giving less." Funny, raw, and colorfully musical, "Nod" plays what teeters, like a tuning fork.
Product details
Binding:
Paperback
Edition:
1
Number of Pages:
76
Release Date:
2015-05-01
Publication Date:
2014-12-30
Publisher:
Johns Hopkins University Press
Languages:
Original:
English
ISBN10:
1421417146
ISBN13:
9781421417141
GPSR Manufacturer Reference:
Minimum Reading Age:
18
Weight:
109 g
Height:
140 cm
Width:
216 cm
Thickness:
4 cm
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