Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance: Poems - Softcover

Joudah, Fady

 
9781571315014: Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance: Poems
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1571315012 ISBN 13: 9781571315014
Verlag: Milkweed Editions, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

An exquisite and humane collection set to leave its mark on American poetics of the body and the body politic.

In Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance, Fady Joudah has written love poems to the lovely and unlovely, the loved and unloved. Here he celebrates moments of delight and awe with his wife, his mentors, his friends, and the beauty of the natural world. Yet he also finds tenderness for the other, the dead, and the disappeared, bringing together the language of medicine with the language of desire in images at once visceral and vulnerable. A symptomatic moon. A peach, quartered like a heart, and a heart, quartered like a peach. “I call the finding of certain things loss.”

Joudah is a translator between the heart and the mind, the flesh and the more-than-flesh, the word body and the world body—and between languages, with a polyglot’s hyperresonant sensibility. In “Sagittal Views,” the book’s middle section, Joudah collaborates with Golan Haji, a Kurdish Syrian writer, to foreground the imaginative act of constructing memory and history. Together they mark the place the past occupies in the body, the cut that “runs deeper than speech.”

Generous in its scope, inventive in its movements and syntax, Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance is a richly rewarding and indispensable collection.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Fady Joudah has published three books of poems, The Earth in the Attic, Alight, and Textu, a book-long sequence of short poems whose meter is cellphone character count. He has translated several collections of poetry from the Arabic. He was a winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition in 2007 and has received a PEN Translation Award, a Banipal/Times Literary Supplement Prize from the UK, the Griffin Poetry Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He lives in Houston, with his wife and kids, where he practices internal medicine.

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Progress Notes

The age of portrait is drugged. Beauty
is symmetry so rare it's a mystery.
My left eye is smaller than my right,
my big mouth shows my nice teeth perfectly
aligned like Muslims in prayer.
My lips an accordion. Each sneeze
a facial thumbprint. One corner
of my mouth hangs downward when I want
to hold a guffaw hostage. Bell's palsy perhaps
or what Mark Twain said about steamboat piloting,
that a doctor's unable to look upon the blush
in a young beauty's face without thinking
it could be a fever, a malar rash,
a butterfly announcing a wolf. Can I lie
facedown now as cadavers posed
on first anatomy lesson? I didn't know mine
was a woman until three weeks later
we turned her over. Out of reverence
there was to be no untimely exposure of donors,
our patrons who were covered in patches
of scrubs-green dish towels,
and by semester's end we were sick of all that,
tossed mega livers and mammoth hearts
into lab air and caught them. My body
was Margaret. That's what the death certificate said
when it was released before finals. The cause
of her death? Nothing memorable,
frail old age. But the colonel on table nineteen
with an accessory spleen had put a bullet through
his temple, a final prayer. Not in entry or exit
were there skull cracks to condemn the house
of death, no shattered glass in the brain,
only a smooth tunnel of deep violet that bloomed
in concentric circles. The weekends were lonely.
He had the most beautiful muscles
of all 32 bodies that were neatly arranged,
zipped up as if a mass grave had been disinterred.
Or when unzipped and facing the ceiling
had cloth over their eyes as if they'd just been executed.
Gray silver hair, chiseled countenance,
he was sixty-seven, a veteran of more than one war.
I had come across that which will end me, extend
me, at least once, without knowing it.

***

Plethora

About the praise I dish your way
jail's the comeuppance of a liar poet

My only want is your content and if I hold
another want may I never be granted it

Each full moon is born of a crescent
yet what's a full moon got?

Vitiligo
and the morning sees me with eyes of dew

a fever breaking out
on your integument

On your skin exanthem
is a pasture of anemones

Because you're one of them
I love my enemies

***

Epithalamion

We hold the present responsible for my hand
in your hand, my thumb

as aspirin leaves a painless bruise, our youth
immemorial in a wormhole for silence

to rescue us, the heart free at last
of the tongue (the dream, the road) upon

which our hours reside together alone,
that this is love's profession, our scents

on pillows displace our alphabet to grass
with fidelity around our wrists

and breastbones, thistle and heather.
And this steady light, angular

through the window, is no amulet
to store in a dog-eared book.

A body exits all pages to be
inscribed on another, itself.

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Verlag
Milkweed Editions
Erscheinungsdatum
2018
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1571315012
ISBN 13 
9781571315014
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
104
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Verantwortliche Person
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