Verwandte Artikel zu In the Good Years

In the Good Years - Softcover

Crest, Laura

 
9781961897564: In the Good Years
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1961897563 ISBN 13: 9781961897564
Verlag: Four Way Books, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

A high-lyric historian of the human project, Laura Cresté fixes her scrupulous gaze on the interwoven threads of this distressed anthropocene era, taking in the whole cloth of our globalized societies while recording the singular details of our individual lives and most intimate relationships—their intricate embroidery, characterizing stains, and fraying hems. In the Good Years confronts a painful family legacy, returning to the violent artistic censorship of Argentina's military dictatorship, her relatives' survival of a Dirty War death camp, and the scattered paths of their migration to safer ground. In reconstructing the past, Cresté resists the individualistic contraction of the coming of age model, not merely solidifying the psychological actualization of a single person as they enter adulthood but discursively expanding the notion of self, discovering the boundaries of identity as they overlay the seams of the broader world. These poems exist because of a narrowly avoided fate, and they bristle with the wild energy of improbable existence even as they touch on seemingly unrelated and often ordinary things: a roast chicken recipe, an aunt's questionable romantic advice, flea-ridden dogs, high school parties, waitressing at a dive bar, drowned newts in the swimming pool, unruly tomato plants, horseback riding. "Once saddled across a mare / named Ramona, I was afraid of the burden of my body," Cresté writes, fearful "that she would buckle—an animal once ridden into war." The sheer brilliance of this book's poetics manifest in lines like these, which bring political, personal, and ecological considerations to bear on the concept of weight in the space of a single sentence. What is the heft of a life that was nearly disappeared? How does a number become a weapon to enforce the gendered economy graphing desirability against power? What is the size of our footprint on this planet, and how heavy must our presence currently be as the animals and the land reach their breaking point? How much do you weigh? How much weight can you carry? "I was a teenager and jealous of the freedom / I imagined belonged to the thin," Cresté admits. "Now I know no one feels free, // not even the creature who devoured / the countryside, ravenous for the time / we were allowed in the field." This stunning debut champions that ravening, relishes the external and internal wilderness of the surrounding environment and our own human nature, and honors appetite as an opportunity to savor each bite for as long as we get to sit at the table. Throughout, these poems keenly subvert experience and memory, asking how we will remember this moment, and if the blessing of being here means we are somehow, even now in all the present's suffering, living in the good years.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Laura Cresté is the author of You Should Feel Bad, winner of a 2019 Chapbook Fellowship from the Poetry Society of America. She holds an MFA from New York University and has received fellowships and other support from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Sewanee Writers' Conference, the Tin House Summer Workshop, the Community of Writers, Monson Arts, and the St. Botolph Club Foundation. Her work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, Bennington Review, The Cortland Review, The Kenyon Review, Poetry Northwest, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. She lives in western Massachusetts.

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Overripe

Sometimes it's like this: slugs
discover the basil no matter where it's planted.
Batshit on the welcome mat. I cave in

the burrow between cherry tomatoes
and rosemary. Every day the chipmunks
dig anew until I fill the hole with sticks,

menacing as the Blair Witch.
After storms, I skim the drowned and stunned
from the pool. Today's accounting:

one dead frog; newts: three dead, two living,
flung far from where the late tomatoes split
lewd as Jesus with his bloody heart.

Mike tends to never-ending tasks,
neatening the yard of fallen twigs,
while I believe in entropy and let it alone.

We drive to the farm with corn stacked on ice.
At the ignition turn, a chipmunk crawls
from the hood, and we confound each other

through the glass. A baby. Glimpsed
and then gone. I wish I remembered the look of it
as well as I do the frog—its terrible skin,

clear coating sliding off like jelly.
Bubble taut across its mouth.
When insurance stops covering my birth

control, I give it up and feel slightly more animal,
sore breasts, and more so when I trade plastic
for a shampoo bar and turn greasy from the coconut.

The radishes never take. Snakes undulate
in the pool and leave their skins behind
on the stone wall, flimsy dresses I'd shuck off

as I climbed drunk into bed for years.
The therapist in my phone asks
if the meditation he prescribed is helping.

Does it matter? I just need
the summer to end, for the garden
to die back a little.

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Verlag
Four Way Books
Erscheinungsdatum
2025
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1961897563
ISBN 13 
9781961897564
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
128
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
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