Mean (Phoenix Poets) - Softcover

Atkinson, Colette LaBouff

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0226030598 ISBN 13: 9780226030593

Verlag: University of Chicago Press, 2008

Inhaltsangabe

In the appropriately titled Mean, Colette LaBouff Atkinson’s speakers confront a series of cruel lovers, estranged ex-husbands and ex-ex-wives, neglectful parents, disrespectful children, menacing drunks, would-be rapists, well-meaning but ineffectual teachers, and that annoying kid in first grade who wouldn’t leave you alone. Managing to “say” what most of us would only think but never dare speak out loud, this stunning debut collection reveals that the horrors and cruelty we experience in everyday life can turn out to be very real indeed. But Atkinson does not merely rake her subjects across the coals: she deftly exposes, instead, how the world mirrors back to us our own meanness, lending it a truth and a history. In forty-three deadpan, often merciless prose poems that are masterpieces of the form, Mean lays bare the darkness within the narrator’s heart as well as in ours.

"Colette Labouff Atkinson’s artful laconicism attains the force of a shout, without ever raising its voice. The intelligent, merciless narrative cool arrays a sad comedy, with an unemphatic but penetrating 'and then . . . and then': accounts of love pursued far more often than it is glimpsed or realized."—Robert Pinsky

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Colette LaBouff Atkinsonis associate director of the International Center for Writing and Translation at the University of California, Irvine.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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mean

By COLETTE LABOUFF ATKINSON

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Copyright © 2008 The University of Chicago
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-03059-3

Contents

Acknowledgments..........................................................ixSpace Race...............................................................3Mean.....................................................................4Mean, Part Two...........................................................6Medium Intense Red Copper................................................8Rocket...................................................................9Loose....................................................................10Heat Wave................................................................11Hart Crane Slept Here....................................................12Four.....................................................................13London (1987)............................................................14Wrecking.................................................................15Three Days of the Condor.................................................16The Glass Show Lounge....................................................17Bakasana.................................................................18Deal.....................................................................19"I'm sorry I was blind"..................................................20Hover....................................................................21Intention (The Dead Leaves)..............................................22Gain.....................................................................23Spring Fling.............................................................24New World................................................................25Laurel...................................................................26Replacement Monkey.......................................................27Spirit...................................................................28Proximity................................................................29Juju's Sister............................................................30Gun Dog..................................................................31Flower Girl..............................................................32Park Bench...............................................................33"Perhaps this verse would please you better-Sue-(2)".....................34Prosthetic...............................................................35Garden Variety...........................................................36"For God's sake, get out"................................................37Route....................................................................381652.....................................................................39Graphic Novel Romance (V for Vendetta)...................................40Ghost Squad..............................................................41Hips.....................................................................421971.....................................................................43Port of Los Angeles......................................................44"Taking it like a little soldier, aren't you?"...........................45Fortune-Telling..........................................................46Gardena Freeway, California..............................................47Notes....................................................................49

Chapter One

Space Race

I knew him before he was broken. He wanted me and I wanted to break him. And then I wanted him not to want me anymore. And then I wanted him to call. When it happened-all of it in just that order-I drove to his house. We watched the longest movie, The Right Stuff, which I had the patience to sit through since I knew at the end we'd have sex. Somewhere in the film, in the middle of an argument about how chasing women who don't matter can ruin everything, Gus Grissom says The issue here ain't pussy. The issue is monkey. And that movie watching had nothing to do with space or history or men or monkeys. All he wanted was sex. I'd waited a couple of years for that: to have seen him broken and mended and then looking right through me, right on to the stars. I would still want to mean so little that I'd be see-thru. Sometimes I can daydream him back to breakable. Mostly, I would want to watch movies with him while he's in love with someone else and helping himself to me.

Mean

Wife two was a stripper. And sweet, as well. He traded her in for me. To people I don't know, I say she was a dancer. I watch them, puzzled, wonder how anyone could not love a ballerina. And you have to question a guy like that: trading in a sweet stripper for me. Not a homemaker. Not home much at all. Not sweet. More like my grandfather, Jimmy Grieco. Mean. My mother likes to describe the blue-sky day when she bought me a helium balloon and I let it go. I was six. I begged for another. She said, okay, but, if you let this one go, I'm really going to be mad. I nodded, took the string in my hand, held tight, and then opened my hand flat so the balloon lifted and its string slipped up and away. You were never sweet, my mother says.

* * *

In Vegas, a few weeks ago, Jimmy and I sorted photographs in his double-wide just off Boulder Highway. My mother stood on the sidelines. She hates how I ask Jimmy for the hard stories. Tell me about the moonshine. Tell me about the dead kids. Tell me how your mother saved the family by burning down the farm. Jimmy's crooked finger points to a picture of the family. That was Leonard. He was deaf and dumb. Died at twelve. That was Vincent. The baby who fell off the staircase without a rail. Dead at two. Then there's his mother, surrounded by her children. She was tough, he says. Tough. When Chicago's Black Hand demanded ten thousand dollars, she stuffed five grand in her apron, grabbed my grandfather-then five-and took him to deliver the money. That's all you'll ever get, she said, and don't touch my kids or I'll kill you.

* * *

My grandfather never asks about the first or second wife. I don't have to tell him that ballerina-fable. He knows I'm three and mean. He knows it for his whole life. His first, my grandmother, was like sugar. He burned her, abandoned her in LA, raced to Mexico, paved road turning to dirt; he ate prickly pear, maybe, on the way to his quick divorce. And, though he won't tell this story, his own father lived, first, with a sweet woman on a wheat farm, far south in Craco, Italy. He boarded a ship, told his wife he'd send for her, and then fled to New York. And in an apartment on Mulberry Street, he met up with the new girlfriend and they disappeared into their new world. She wasn't pretty. She was tough. She got busted twice for making moonshine. Her sons loved her. She was mean.

Mean, Part Two

Wife one was a child-bride. He introduced her to me in Greenport, New York, eight years ago. She wore her black skirt the same length I wore mine. A woman like that, who covers her legs, likes to hide. Right away, she told me she was always torn over work. Told me how she cried her eyes out years earlier when, divorced, she had to leave her baby for a long day away. By then, she'd been left for wife two.

And you have to wonder about a guy like that: trading in his child-bride, leaving his son and newborn, for another. But we...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Chicago Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2008
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0226030598
• ISBN 13: 9780226030593
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 61
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar