Moreover - Softcover

Anstett, Aaron

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1944697039 ISBN 13: 9781944697037

Verlag: Sagging Meniscus Press, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

Poetry. The poems in Aaron Anstett's MOREOVER, by turns laconic and garrulous, hard-boiled and tender, magnify gaps and unreliabilities in the surface of things through which the depths of an underlying desolation, a nameless existential care, and the mystery of love may be glimpsed; they make a swaying bridge over the abyss of loss. Number among my umpteen flaws detached glibness, he writes; Who would disagree that little's glitchless? What he calls his glibness, transmitted with a compressed but graceful musicality, often attains an unsentimental lyricism all the more touching for its reticence. His audacious imagination and relentless intelligence give rise to a richly ironic humor that is often valedictory, somber, even grim, but never without profound affection and attention. What makes Aaron Anstett's poems unforgettable? Is it the last known photograph of Robert Desnos, in Theresienstadt, 1945? A pigeon feather on pavement? A speaker who asks, 'Who's most dumbstruck anything exists?' No to all of those, I'd say, for what this poet gives us are not just things and their tragedies but moments in which to witness our own gestures toward life, the acts of willed and failed attention that constitute hope--a hope both breathtaking and fleeting, as the poems unfurl line by line, in a syntax built to mend, then break, then mend again, your heart.--Susan Tichy

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Aaron Anstett's collections of poetry are SUSTENANCE (New Rivers Press, 1997), No Accident, Each Place the Body's, INSOFAR AS HERETOFORE (The Backwaters Press, 2014), and MOREOVER (Sagging Meniscus Press, 2016). Among other honors, his work has received the Nebraska Book Award, the Backwaters Press Prize, and the Balcones Poetry Prize, and he has served as a regional poet laureate, instituting a continuing program that places pamphlets of poems by local writers in waiting areas. He lives in Colorado with his wife, Lesley, and children.

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Moreover

By Aaron Anstett

Sagging Meniscus Press

Copyright © 2016 Aaron Anstett
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-944697-03-7

Contents

Thicket, 
The Night There, 
Fortune, 
Geographic Cure, 
Parable, 
Moreover, 
Yes, No, Sure, 
Spell, 
Limits, 
What You Mean by "I", 
Subject, 
Landscape with Disclaimers, 
Red Star Shells, 
Apparently, 
The People, 
There Arose a Smoke, 
Body a Lot of Territory, 
Believe, 
One Aesthetic, 
Selfie Stick, 
Ipse Dixit, 
Noble Truths, 
Moreover, 
To the Office for the Inevitable's Futile Redress, 
Wiring, 
Natural, 
The Historical Record, 
Moreover, 
You Say You'd Be at Sea at Sea So Stay Away, Land's Stowaway, 
The Old Neighborhood, 
Restless, 
Ilk, 
The Bargain, 
All Things, 
Partial Concordance, 
Between A and The, 
A Valediction, 
Certainty, 
Birth of Doubt, 
Passengers, 
A Legacy, 
Lapse, 
Big Statement, 
Plots, 
Best Intentions, 
A Tragic Sense of Life, 
For Example, 
Emblem, 
Address, 
Moreover, 
Halloween Costumes: Reclusive Creator or End of All Being, 
Endurance, 
Class Struggle, 
Kingdom, Phylum, Species, 
Always Go to Other People's Funerals, Otherwise They Won't Come to Yours, 
Lines Written in the Anthropocene, 
Distant Hills, 
In Search of Lost Time, 
Memorial Plaques, 

CHAPTER 1

    Thicket

    Men outside the mission look biblical,
    barefoot on sidewalks,
    blankets for raiment.

    Elsewhere that city an expert perfects
    the crackle of liquor over ice in digital audio,
    mist a sizzle and hiss.

    Someone believes invisible threads
    extend through all matter. Someone's haunted
    by objects in pawnshops: power tools,

    wedding rings, guns. Another wonders
    with what is a body synonymous,
    of what is a thicket indicative.


    The Night There

    "In the night there are no guardian angels, but there is sleep."

    Poor strategy combating insomnia
    calculating hurdles a sleepwalking

    Robert Desnos leaps around an oval.
    Not "leaps" so much as swings one leg over,

    straddles, then wiggles free from, slowly,
    as if under water, jersey number less

    number than punctuation mark or wiggling
    scribble. As cinders crackle under slippers

    he utters marvelous, improbable sentences,
    eyelids maroon and hooded. Less "hooded"

    than drooping as theater curtains or violet
    cravat and smoking jacket I wish he wore

    instead of striped pajamas in last known
    photograph, Theresienstadt, 1945.


    Fortune

    Searching surgery mortality statistics
    on phone in waiting room returns
    Complete Concordance to Holy Scripture,
    "I beheld, and, lo, there was no man,
    and all the birds of the heavens were fled."
    Thank whomever I will not return
    to my old job baiting vermin traps,
    hands damp in surgical gloves, thumbing
    poisoned cubes of food all day into plastic
    hollows then go home and drink beer
    until I have to go and buy more. Workers
    of the world, my brain knows better
    but my heart's a communist, redistributing
    wealth in perpetual revolution. No joke,
    the specters. Hunger. Poverty.
    Late-Era Capitalism, what next? Yes,
    the long nineteenth century repressed
    then killed everyone. Yes, all history
    plague and conquest, tangle of skeletons,
    every extremity of What We'll Do for Money.
    Yes, life mostly tedium when not histrionic
    as opera. For years I carried the fortune
    in my wallet All of your troubles will soon
    be over. Pixels across the Internet portray
    anatomy and famous people's babies.
    Names create in the mouth and brain
    the pucker and taste of things, fish, pepper,
    onion, lemon, but do not, alas, replenish.
    And now, thank whomever, among the 99%
    surviving this procedure, you and your 1,200
    thread-count laugh in the 900 thread-count air.


    Geographic Cure

    Say this for the universe: at least it's merciless
    everywhere equally. Likely we're alone
    in longing for clouds to collaborate with wind
    and spell, elaborate, wavery script, This Way
    to the Grand As-Is, then leak and spill where needed.
    Land on fire, for instance, and where people thirst.
    Number among my umpteen flaws detached glibness.
    Who would disagree that little's glitchless?
    I withdraw my petition for Arbortrary Day,
    when I thought we'd rise in multitudes to fell
    trees at random and appease the minor deities
    who've not yet provided a passable answer
    to the general question "Why?" Some say water
    clairvoyant and render as evidence telepathy
    of electrical current. Some assert a name not
    worth the breath to say it. Some allege a raspberry
    one seed's most direct and eloquent expression.


    Parable

    Multiply quantity of sunlight through windows
    by total any Friday "At least it's Friday"

    guffawed in offices.
    How often I think you alive again.

    Which will not happen.
    Even if the latest celebrity tyrant commanded it.

    Then my feelings feel burlap, texture and color.
    Then I call on the fabled

    shoulder angel and demon to help me,
    but nothing. Not even a...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Sagging Meniscus Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2016
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1944697039
• ISBN 13: 9781944697037
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 82
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland