The Lightning That Strikes the Neighbors' House

by Nick Lantz

Overview

Nick Lantz explores the transformative power of tragic and miraculous experiences, through these poems that illuminate near misses of tragedy and transcendence. His gaze is both roving and microscopic--the Challenger explosion, Bigfoot, a love letter written from inside a missile silo, a mother naming and re-naming a family's short-lived pets, and a plea for post-9/11 redemption. Lantz never lets his subjects or his readers off the hook, plunging head first into worlds that are both eccentric and familiar, alarming and hopeful.
Finalist, Foreword Magazine's Poetry Book of the Year

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780299235840
Publisher:	University of Wisconsin Press
Publication date:	04/01/2010
Series:	Wisconsin Poetry Series
Edition description:	1
Pages:	80
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Nick Lantz is a writer and editor in Madison, Wisconsin, and a former Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is author of We Don't Know We Don't Know, winner of the Breadloaf Writers' Conference Bakeless Prize.

Read an Excerpt

What can be said about grace
                 that does not diminish it?
To play a drunk, the best actors pretend to be sober.
The street mime ladles water
                  from his leaky canoe.
Of the blind dog and the three-legged rabbit he chases, only
     one can be lucky tonight. Our cousins race
                          every train
to its crossing on principle; it’s no surprise they win.
—excerpt from “Conditional”
© The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System. All rights reserved.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments   

Where You Are, Where You've Been, Where You're Going
Ship of Theseus   
The Werewolf Dreams of Love   
The Diving Horses   
Love Letter from inside the Titan Missile Museum   
The Miracle   
What the Lathe Wants   
U.S. Route 50, Nevada, the Loneliest Road in America   
Mother's Intelligent Design   
Patterson-Gimlin Film: Frame 352   
History of Fire   

What Land of Milk and Honey
Portmanterrorism   
Misanthropy   
Bride Believes Terrorists Kidnapped Missing Groom   
Kuzka's Mother   
A Coign of Vantage   
The Cryptozoologist Chaperones His Daughter's Prom   
Judith & Holofernes   
The Pinch   
The Marian Apparitions   
The Cricket in the Basement   
The Soul Diva, Past Her Prime, Visits the Holy Land   
Challenger   
Love Letter from Zion National Park, Utah   

Back to Earth Unharmed
Collective   
Battle of Alexander at Issus   
Conditional   
The Year We Blew Up the Whale—Florence, Oregon   
Teach a Man to Fish   
Trying to Cross the Border, the War Correspondent Is Jailed   
The Giant Squid   
Arc Welding Lesson   
SETI   
The Aging Sci-Fi Actor Speaks to Third Graders at the Local Planetarium   
The Last Words of Pancho Villa   
A Winter of Sitting by the Window   

Editorial Reviews

"Blending pop culture with history, dark humor with philosophy, and lyric intensity with a confident narrative voice, The Lightning That Strikes the Neighbors' House adds up to be far greater than the sum of its parts. The end result is a wise, intelligent book that lingers long after being read, and which further proves that Nick Lantz--despite the lethal irony of his work--is a poet to be believed in."--Kevin González

"Lantz forces us again and again to reexamine the way we see through such a juxtaposition of facts as well as through the voices of characters who search for and experience improbable things: a cryptozoologist, those listening for aliens with SETI, a sci-fi actor, a werewolf. The Lightning That Strikes the Neighbors' House becomes a lament not only for the neighbors and their tragedy but for ourselves--that we're unharmed, that we can keep on keeping on."--The Rumpus

"Lantz is a poet of many talents, but perhaps his greatest gift is juxtaposition. . . . We listen, amazed, as in poem after poem these notations we would have thought dissonant in fact harmonize, and then crescendo. That I can't figure out how he does it just heightens the thrill."--Joel Brouwer

"Nick Lantz's We Don't Know We Don't Know and The Lightning That Strikes the Neighbors' House are both phenomenal books--the former is the 2009 Bakeless Prize-winner for poetry, the latter the 2010 Felix Pollack Prize-winner. Let's acknowledge that any writer who won just one of those contests would be worth attention; to win both prizes, and to have the books come out basically simultaneously, is the equivalent of a baseball player hitting a home run not just in his first at-bat, but off his first pitch." --Rain Taxi

"Nick Lantz's impressive poems are remarkable for their range and the variety of ways they maneuver down the page. . . . This is one of the finest books I've read in years."--Vern Rutsala

From the Publisher