Sightseer in This Killing City (Penguin Poets) - Softcover

Gloria, Eugene

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0143133845 ISBN 13: 9780143133841

Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group, 2019

Inhaltsangabe

A fourth collection from a prize-winning poet whose "gift is breathtaking" (Naomi Shihab Nye)

Eugene Gloria's Sightseer in This Killing City captures the surreal and disorienting feelings of the present. In the wake of recent presidential elections in the United States and in the Philippines, Gloria's latest collection sharpens his obsession with arrivals and departures, gun violence, displacement, cultural legacy, and the bitter divisions in America. Through the voice of Nacirema, the central persona of the collection, we are introduced to a character who chooses mystery and inhabits landscapes fraught with beauty and brutality. Gloria quotes melodies from seventies soul and jazz, blending the urban lament of Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane with the idiom of Stevie Wonder and Fela Kuti. Sightseer in this Killing City is an argument for grace and perseverance in an era of bombast and bullies.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Eugene Gloria's previous poetry collections are My Favorite Warlord, winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, Hoodlum Birds, and Drivers at the Short-Time Motel (2000), a National Poetry Series selection and recipient of the Asian American Literary Award. He lives in Greencastle, Indiana, and teaches at DePauw University.

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IMPLICIT BODY

Of my self-creation is this legend
of my betrayals, my disloyalty to my origins.
 
Of my once and future past,
of rajas and gilded palaces,
of brown sailors building empires, I lay no claim.
 
I lay no claim to your founding fathers,
no claim to pearl divers and tattooed pirates
jumping ship to grow a colony in Louisiana.
 
What I’ve inherited is this feeding frenzy
for rainbow, rainbow, rainbow,
this multigenerational spectral light show
 
inducing a diarrhea of bullets; and no arrests.
I’m the youngest son of a youngest son,
a second baseman in the minor leagues,
 
a family trope deputized to react
and bleed—whose only compensation
is his own capacious longing.
 
Hand me your gun, America,
and let my body be the soundtrack
to the spectacle of our recent events.
 
If only this miasmic island of sundown
towns and Bible colleges, of folksy neighbors
with their hiya doin’ gestures and holding
keys to the kingdom come raining down
with molten rocks upon this megalomania
 
of abandoned cities, of cowslip turnips, of holy
JesuschildrenofAmerica, of thee I sing!
 
Call me Mr. Gone / who’s done made / some other plans.
All that remains is nostalgia
and this aching torso of blue.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2019
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0143133845
• ISBN 13: 9780143133841
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 112
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Terminal Video; n.pederzini@terminaldistribuzione.com; ; Via Bruno Buozzi, 24/26,; Granarolo dell'Emilia BO,; Italien