Exit, Civilian: Poems

by Idra Novey

Overview

In her second collection, Idra Novey steps in and out of jails, courthouses, and caves to explore what confinement means in the twenty-first century. From the beeping doors of a prison in New York to cellos playing in a former jail in Chile, she looks at prisons that have opened, closed, and transformed to examine how the stigma of incarceration has altered American families, including her own. Novey writes of the expanding prison complex that was once a field and imagines what’s next for the civilians who enter and exit it each day.

On Bafflement

We drew a prison in the sand and it wouldn’t go away.

Not even beneath the foam of the biggest waves.

The torn leg of a starfish clung to the door.

A piece of seaweed clung to the bars over the windows.

The tide came in higher and we thought, So much for the prison.

Somebody asked why did we draw that thing,

And were we growing old watching it this way.

We felt compelled to make love in the sand a few feet off.

Then we drew another one, just to see if we’d make love again.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780820343488
Publisher:	University of Georgia Press
Publication date:	04/15/2012
Series:	The National Poetry Series
Pages:	88
Sales rank:	711,252
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

IDRA NOVEY is the author of the novel Ways to Disappear. Her fiction and poetry have been translated into ten languages, and she has written for the New York Times the Los Angeles Times, NPR’s All Things Considered, New York Magazine, and the Paris Review. She is the recipient of awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Poets & Writers Magazine, the PEN Translation Fund, and the Poetry Foundation. She has taught at Princeton University, Columbia, NYU, Fordham, the Catholic University of Chile, and in the Bard Prison Initiative.

IDRA NOVEY is the author of the novel Ways to Disappear. Her fiction and poetry have been translated into ten languages, and she has written for the New York Times the Los Angeles Times, NPR’s All Things Considered, New York Magazine, and the Paris Review. She is the recipient of awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Poets & Writers Magazine, the PEN Translation Fund, and the Poetry Foundation. She has taught at Princeton University, Columbia, NYU, Fordham, the Catholic University of Chile, and in the Bard Prison Initiative.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

The Little Prison

Then, before understanding, my heart went

Civilian Exiting the Facilities
Riding By on a Sunday
Aspect
Overhead
Parole
The Little Prison Responds
All Ceremonies Start with Inspection
Meanwhile the Watermelon Seed
Titles in the City Library

white as hair whitens. Then, before understanding

Eighteen Hours of Daylight
As Charged
House Arrest
The County Courthouse in the Winter
The Itinerant
Grand Jury, the Sound of Leaves
Slide Show
Table for Six
Parole Hearing
Before They Came for Us
Hearsay
The Little Prison Responds to the City
Titles in the City Library

my heart went white as hair whitens

On Bafflement
The Etymological Beginning
Recent Findings
The Metaphysics of Furniture
The Lava Game
Instead of
The Little Prison Responds
If Vallejo Hadn't Died in Paris
Riot
Titles in the City Library

Then, before understanding, my heart went

O Caldeirão do Diabo
Memorias do Cárcere
Fist and After, El Cinzano
A Maça no Oscuro
The Guest
The Ex-Cárcel of Valparaíso
The Last Beep and Door

Notes

Editorial Reviews

Novey (The Next Country) devotes her spare, angry and careful second book, selected for the National Poetry Series by Patricia Smith, to imprisonment: incarceration as a metaphor, the literal troubles of inmates in the U.S., and, in the book’s last segments, the infamous carceral spaces—a Brazilian island, a Valparaiso jail—used by tyrannical Latin American regimes. Novey has taught in prisons in New York State, and some terse prose poems reflect her experience: “In the shine of a car outside the prison my reflection gets wider until it splits.” Her attention, however, remains with the people who have to live inside: their patience, lost opportunities, humiliations, and final dignity. Novey’s best work complements (rather than trying to become) journalism, and it demands quotation. “To be quiet in a prison, Janet said, is to admit that you’re there.” The work may seem slight, or distractingly miniature, beside the work of other poets who visited prisons (C.D. Wright) or who have spent time inside (Dwayne Betts). As the poems slide between prison as figure for anyone (the excellent “House Arrest,” about family life) and prison as daily reality for some, Novey’s goals can get in each other’s way. And yet the book reveals superb acts of attention, by a writer whose reliable moral sense matches her first-rate ear. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

A meditation on imprisonment, using surrealism as a tool to understanding the real; this is a smart and immaculately crafted book that deserves and rewards you.

The Volta - Mathias Svalina

Novey’s work has always had a subversive quality, exploring unsanctioned facets of identity, and her discoveries here are just as fresh as in her first collection, if more openly dangerous and political. . . . [Her] images and scenes are meticulously constructed, crystalline, inviting us into a parallel world that reflects back the darker parts of our own.

Denver Quarterly - Michael Simon

We only imagine ourselves free. Idra Novey's stark, inventive poems hurtle forth with brash lyricism, forcing us to reflect on our roles as captives, alternate swinging open and slamming shut the prison doors. There is no work like this, no tales so beautiful and hurtful, no stanzas that bite this hard and linger this long.

author of Blood Dazzler - Patricia Smith

[Novey's] modes vary from flashes of anecdote to surreal narrative, from prose to brief lyrics to long-lined poems. The effect is one of an extended reach toward concretions, routines and environments that won't yield to mere wishes to understand or change them. . . . In Exit, Civilian, the thing is the prison, intractably present—and freedom, more than simply a life outside a jail, comprises an infinite speculation on the meaning of itself. The tonal gives way to the atonal, the fuzzy.

On the Seawall - Ron Slate

‘Enter an apple / And come out the teeth marks / In its yellowed core,’ writes Idra Novey. In this spare, remarkable collection, she harnesses and transforms prison experience into a visionary exploration where boundaries dissolve, and we find ourselves transformed.

author of The Ginkgo Light - Arthur Sze

In Exit, Civilian, Idra Novey takes Vasko Popa’s ‘little box’ and morphs it into a ‘little prison.’ The sweetness of the name ‘little prison’ draws us in, and Novey tracks her discomfort with the justice system with surprising and illuminating tenderness. Novey has taught for the Bard Prison Initiative—one poem zooms in on the poignant detail of the crumpling of a wedding dress as it moves into and out of the prison, another imagines a mother named ‘Trial’ giving birth to a child, ‘Verdict.’ I finished this book with these words still in my head: ‘Do you want to hear more / About the little prison / Have you noticed / It is everywhere.’ These poems truly change what and how we see.

author of Modern Life - Matthea Harvey

"We only imagine ourselves free. Idra Novey's stark, inventive poems hurtle forth with brash lyricism, forcing us to reflect on our roles as captives, alternate swinging open and slamming shut the prison doors. There is no work like this, no tales so beautiful and hurtful, no stanzas that bite this hard and linger this long."—Patricia Smith, author of Blood Dazzler

"In Exit, Civilian, Idra Novey takes Vasko Popa’s ‘little box’ and morphs it into a ‘little prison.’ The sweetness of the name ‘little prison’ draws us in, and Novey tracks her discomfort with the justice system with surprising and illuminating tenderness. Novey has taught for the Bard Prison Initiative—one poem zooms in on the poignant detail of the crumpling of a wedding dress as it moves into and out of the prison, another imagines a mother named ‘Trial’ giving birth to a child, ‘Verdict.’ I finished this book with these words still in my head: ‘Do you want to hear more / About the little prison / Have you noticed / It is everywhere.’ These poems truly change what and how we see."—Matthea Harvey, author of Modern Life

"‘Enter an apple / And come out the teeth marks / In its yellowed core,’ writes Idra Novey. In this spare, remarkable collection, she harnesses and transforms prison experience into a visionary exploration where boundaries dissolve, and we find ourselves transformed."—Arthur Sze, author of The Ginkgo Light

"[T]he book reveals superb acts of attention, by a writer whose reliable moral sense matches her first-rate ear."—Publishers Weekly

"The prisons, courthouses, and hideaways featured in Novey's National Poetry Series winner are very real, but we don't encounter so much bars, barbs, and barbed wire as metaphysical shrinkage and change. . . . Startling."—Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

"A meditation on imprisonment, using surrealism as a tool to understanding the real; this is a smart and immaculately crafted book that deserves and rewards you."—Mathias Svalina, The Volta

“Novey’s work has always had a subversive quality, exploring unsanctioned facets of identity, and her discoveries here are just as fresh as in her first collection, if more openly dangerous and political. . . . [Her] images and scenes are meticulously constructed, crystalline, inviting us into a parallel world that reflects back the darker parts of our own.”—Michael Simon, Denver Quarterly

"[Novey's] modes vary from flashes of anecdote to surreal narrative, from prose to brief lyrics to long-lined poems. The effect is one of an extended reach toward concretions, routines and environments that won't yield to mere wishes to understand or change them. . . . In Exit, Civilian, the thing is the prison, intractably present—and freedom, more than simply a life outside a jail, comprises an infinite speculation on the meaning of itself. The tonal gives way to the atonal, the fuzzy." —Ron Slate, On the Seawall

From the Publisher