The End of Desire

The End of Desire

by Jill Bialosky
The End of Desire

The End of Desire

by Jill Bialosky

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Overview

Jill Bialosky's first collection of poems is an exceptional one--moving, very accomplished, marked by an unflinching realism and a sharply observant eye combined with great technical skill. Childhood and adolescence shattered by a father's death and the struggles of a mother to raise her daughters are among its concerns. The poems have a dignity and magic that are quite distinctive.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780307555939
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date: 02/04/2009
Sold by: Random House
Format: eBook
Pages: 88
File size: 2 MB

About the Author

Jill Bialosky was born in Cleveland, Ohio. she studied at Ohio University and received a Masters of Arts degree from the Writing Seminars at The Johns Hopkins University, and a Master of Fine Arts degree from The University of Iowa's Writers Workshop. Her poems have been published in many magazines, including Partisan Review and TriQuarterly, and have received a number of awards. She is currently an editor at W. W. Norton & Company and lives in New York City.

Read an Excerpt

When I was a child
I used to love to stare at lovers--
at couples kissing, a man looking
longingly into a woman's eyes,
a woman adoring back
and marvel over the possibilities of love.
Usually I was with my sister,
standing in a grocery line,
or outside a theater.
She would tug at my sleeve,
roll her eyes and banish me with her words:
"Stop staring! What's wrong with you!"
I did feel that something was wrong--
that I could be so content absorbing
the wave of her hair, the scent of perfume,
his strong fingers cupped around her shoulder.
It was the long, uninterurupted gaze I most preferred.
At the movies, I would draw into myself
as I watched on the big screen lovers kiss
and felt a stab of pain in the center of my stomach
travel through my body like a drug--
and for that brief time it was as though
I was the lover, the receiver of such rapt attention.
When the lights came on I carried the kiss
with me all through the rest of the late afternoon,
through the long walk home underneath the autumn arbors,
through the dull and tedious routine of dinner,
until I was alone in my bedroom and could replay
the scene in my mind without interuption.
I knew that as long as I was allowed to look,
to linger, to stare,
to become one with that spell that was so other,
to know and then to have--
that one day, my desire would end.

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