Spit Back a Boy
Poems
Athens : University of Georgia Press, ©2011.
Format: Book
Description: x, 78 pages ; 22 cm
"Iain Haley Pollock's poems cover the ground from a woman late to catfish supper to an ancient queen who howls, "Sea, you is ugly," from the creaking of slave ships launched from Lancaster to gunfire on a contemporary Philadelphia street. Such lyric moments find grounding in stories woven through this book--in one story line, a boy with a black mother and white father wishes he could shed his white skin or carve into what lies beneath: "I flung my almost white self / into my mother's embrace--that brown / embrace I hoped would swallow me whole / and spit back a boy four shades darker." Another thread follows a marriage and a woman intertwined with hunger and the blues, a woman who hears a whale song in a refrigerator's hum, who cries hard like the lonely barking of a fox. Even when these poems soften, they can't be complacent about good fortune: for all the maple seedpods and snow fluttering down here, the poems are always aware of wreckage and car bombs there, and they keep conscious of the mustard gas of old wars and the losses of recent ones. Punctuated with lives that end early, such as those of Hart Crane and Mikey Clark, a high-school classmate who once swiped the Communion wine, Pollock's collection earns its vitality and romance without closing its eyes to violence and sorrow." -- Publisher.
Contents:
Rattla cain't hold me -- Port of origin : Lancaster -- Recessive gene -- Hart Crane as Jim Crow -- At River Rock Farm -- Chorus of X, the rescuers' mark -- Upon irremediable shores, those who never had time -- Frog -- Child of the sun -- Second line -- Longing as Hoppin John -- Oya in Old City -- Hard bop for poor boy -- Killadelphia -- Lieutenant, returned -- Snow in wartime -- On the porch, almost men -- Medusa of Libya -- Flight -- Confirmation -- King Biscuit time -- Appalachia -- My stove's in good condition -- Black Irish -- Shot & killed -- Blue note 53428 -- Burn pile -- And your young men shall see visions ... -- Queen of the lower ninth -- Northbound -- Camphor -- Diaspora remembers Guantanamo -- Eastern State penitentiary -- Looking glass is dead -- School-march, each day's festival -- Whale song -- Like a blind boy jumping from shed to shed -- (So tired of standing still we got to) move on -- Migratory habits -- Vertical hold -- Affection -- Ne me quitte pas -- Spring & the catkins -- Beth David Cemetery, Long Island.
ISBN:
9780820339085
Availability | |||
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Call Number | Location | Shelf Location | Status |
LITERATURE Poetry Pol | Main (Downtown) | Third Level, Nonfiction | In |