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Another Last Day: Poems - Softcover

Lemon, Alex

 
9781571314512: Another Last Day: Poems
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1571314512 ISBN 13: 9781571314512
Verlag: Milkweed Editions, 2019

Inhaltsangabe

Poetry Finalist for the 2019 Writers' League of Texas Book Award

Over the course of four collections of poems, Alex Lemon has become known for his kinetic voice and sense of the dark absurd. Now this electrifying poet moves in a new direction—with a book-length sequence at once intensely vulnerable and thoroughly of our moment.

Populated by visions and ghosts, Another Last Day follows its speaker on a search through a natural landscape turned on its edge, the landscape of today’s America. In these poems, the moments of an ordinary day are rendered in raw, nearly hallucinatory detail: Ants drunk on cherry-red hummingbird nectar. An ambulance rushing into the distance. Endless rain. And, stranger: A dog carrying a hand in its mouth. An emergency room filled with moans. A place where reality and dreams merge, where “the dead refuse to be left / underground.”

When Lemon’s speaker invites us “behind my closed eyes,” it is into the vision of a speaker so plugged into the livingness of this world that he is tossed to the edge of living itself. And yet, in his poems, this openness is never just painful. “the world is a terrible place,” he writes, “but I want to last forever // clinging to its teeth.”

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Alex Lemon is the author of Happy: A Memoir and Feverland: A Memoir in Shards, and the poetry collections Mosquito, Hallelujah Blackout, Fancy Beasts, and The Wish Book. His writing has appeared in Esquire, The Best American Poetry 2008, AGNI, Gulf Coast, the Kenyon Review, and Tin House, among others. He has been awarded a Literature Fellowship in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts, and he contributes and reviews frequently for a wide range of media outlets. He lives with his wife and two children in Fort Worth, and teaches at Texas Christian University.

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all this time
death has refused

to take me & now
when the willows

darken from my chest rips
a flame-winged black-

bird my bones knot
with goodbyes breaking

to not be a carousel
whirring darkly

***

ambulance lights
in the distance throb

my blood & in my guts
I feel my home

on fire
my family

singing ablaze
from fire-curtained

windows―We are good
We are good―they croon

but it is too late always
now too bright

***

forever along the river
it is a hot hot gust

today I welcome
fat raindrops welcome

whirlwind & hello coming
darkness where am I

***

sun-bleached mannequins
rise into the sky

from the bruised water
empty birdcages bend

low the lilacs
a torn orange dress

I long ago yearned to
wear laces the brambles

without knowing
what I am

I go

***

when I look down
there is nothing

of me but a ragged duffel
bag sinking into the shallows

two babies are zipped up in it
or just one baby

besides me
it is suffocating

in here it is dark
I would be anything else

sunflower black ice
prickly pear

this life of heat
waving apparitions

I am tumbling king
protea pothole

I am asleep I
am drowning

***

in the parking lot
a thousand hisses punch

above me in the hot wind
the lights burr on

night puckers with blinks
inside my chest

there is a flowering fist
an empty can herky-jerks

across the humid-slick asphalt
I too am a glassbreak hum

from the coal black beyond
the blinding lights

suddenly falls wet
sizzling needles

***

the drizzle makes
the pearled darkness

all around me
terrible & lovely

soon it is pouring
I have never wanted

anything
growing

puddles perfectly swallow
the gloaming the murk

fluttering with thousands
of tiny mouths roaring

silver-lipped water wells
opening away

***

with my heart
absent in the morning

I walk long staring
overturned sofa on the playground

gutted stuffing clotheslined
from chain link to hydrant

a radiance of cigarette butts
on the cracked sidewalk

squirrel skull on a swing
a mop of yarn clump-floating

the mucky creek
it is a bonfire sinking

a sewage-tattered wig
wisping

shrouded below it
in the brackish water

I know
the rest

of me slumps
a pock-faced zombie

trudging the pitch black
rocky bottom the silt

with grub white legs
flesh tearing away in flags

skin nibbled at
by rainbow trout by catfish

by hatchets of pike
all day I follow it follow myself

down stream
telling the gusting wind

about the way things are
in this life―

a body dropped
from the hand

into a pot of boiling water
will balloon

with moisture become so soft
the flesh will hold

the shape of anything
that presses into it―

a hand the ghost of a jellyfish
goodbye lines skin

etched by a swim suit

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Verlag
Milkweed Editions
Erscheinungsdatum
2019
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1571314512
ISBN 13 
9781571314512
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
104
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Buchpark GmbH
gpsr@buchpark.de

Krügerweg 1
Trebbin
Brandenburg
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Deutschland