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Overview
One of The New York Times' 10 Favorite Poetry Books of 2014
An astonishing new collection from one of our finest emerging poets
A shark's tooth, the shape-shifting cloud drifting from a smokestack, the smoke detectors that hang, ominous but disregarded, overhead—very little escapes the watchful eye of Joshua Mehigan. The poems in Accepting the Disaster range from lyric miniatures like "The Crossroads," a six-line sketch of an accident scene, to "The Orange Bottle," an expansive narrative page-turner whose main character suffers a psychotic episode after quitting medication. Mehigan blends the naturalistic milieu of such great chroniclers of American life as Stephen Crane and Studs Terkel with the cinematic menace and wonder of Fritz Lang. Balanced by the music of his verse, this unusual combination brings an eerie resonance to the real lives and institutions it evokes.
These poems capture with equal tact the sinister quiet of a deserted Main Street, the tragic grandiosity of Michael Jackson, the loneliness of a self-loathing professor, the din of a cement factory, and the saving grandeur of the natural world. This much-anticipated second collection is the work of a nearly unrivaled craftsman, whose first book was called by Poetry "a work of some poise and finish, by turns delicate and robust."
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780374713379 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| Publication date: | 07/01/2014 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 96 |
| File size: | 462 KB |
About the Author
Joshua Mehigan's first book, The Optimist, was a finalist for the 2005 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry. His poems have appeared in many periodicals, including The New Republic, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Poetry, where he has been a frequent contributor of poems and essays. His writing has also been featured in Poetry Daily and The Writer's Almanac, and in numerous anthologies. He is the recent recipient of Poetry magazine's 2013 Levinson Prize and of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Mehigan lives in New York City.
Joshua Mehigan’s first book, The Optimist, was a finalist for the 2005 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry. His poems have appeared in periodicals including The New Republic, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Poetry, where he has been a frequent contributor of poems and essays. His writing has also been featured on Poetry Daily and The Writer’s Almanac, and in numerous anthologies. He is the recent recipient of Poetry magazine’s Editor’s Prize for Feature Article, and of a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Mehigan lives in New York City.
Read an Excerpt
Accepting the Disaster
By Joshua Mehigan
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Copyright © 2014 Joshua MehiganAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-374-71337-9
CHAPTER 1
Here
Nothing has changed. They have a welcome sign,
a hill with cows and a white house on top,
a mall and grocery store where people shop,
a diner where some people go to dine.
It is the same no matter where you go,
and downtown you will find no big surprises.
Each fall the dew point falls until it rises.
White snow, green buds, green lawn, red leaves, white snow.
This is all right. This is their hope. And yet,
though what you see is never what you get,
it does feel somehow changed from what it was.
Is it the people? Houses? Fields? The weather?
Is it the streets? Is it these things together?
Nothing here ever changes, till it does.
The Smokestack
The town had a smokestack.
It had a church spire.
The church was prettier,
but the smokestack was higher.
It was a lone ruined column,
a single snuffed taper,
a field gun fired at heaven,
a tube making vapor.
The smoke thinned the attention.
Its aspect kept transforming.
It could look like a cloud, or like
mosquitoes swarming.
The smokestack's bricks were yellow,
and its mouth twenty feet wide.
Its smoke was usually pale,
but there was a rust color on its side.
The smoke was yellow coral,
a bouquet of yellow roses,
a yellow beard, a yellow eye,
and sometimes runny noses.
Often it looked heavy
like junipers under snow.
At dawn it was limpidly pink
and shaped like an embryo.
It could look like Cuba
as seen from outer space.
It could look like a pedestal stone.
It could look like Jesus' face.
The busy residents
tended to ignore it,
though no one alive remembered
a time before it.
Sometimes it looked like ermine,
sometimes like elderflower.
Sometimes it looked like a Persian cat,
and sometimes like power.
It came before Lincoln Steffens.
It survived Eric Blair.
It was older than stop signs.
It would always be there,
resembling a tuxedo ruffle,
or an elephant head,
or a balled-up blanket
on a hospital bed.
It stopped three times a year,
but only for one day.
Once, in the '30s, it seemed to die.
Many families went away.
But it stayed dead a week,
and when it was resurrected,
the sky turned black, and then white,
as if a new pope were elected.
To labor it looked like a witness,
to management a snitch,
to both victim and perpetrator
it looked like getting rich.
At the Chamber of Commerce,
on a postcard of the square,
you'd find it in the background,
diminutive but there.
On cool summer evenings,
it billowed like azure silk.
On cold winter mornings,
it spread like spilled milk.
Fire Safety
Aluminum tank
indifferent in its place
behind a glass door
in the passageway,
like a tea urn
in a museum case;
screaming-machines
that dumbly spend each day
waiting for gas or smoke
or hands or heat,
positioned like beige land mines
overhead,
sanguine on walls,
or posted on the street
like dwarf grandfather clocks
spray-painted red;
little gray hydrant
in its warlike stance;
old fire escape,
all-weather paint job peeling,
a shelf for mildewed rugs
and yellowing plants;
sprinkler heads,
blooming from the public ceiling;
all sitting
supernaturally still,
waiting for us to cry out.
And we will.
The Sponge
None of us understands our story better
than this nonentity, unconscious slip
of nature, nonetheless our common parent
dilating at the bottom of the sea.
The parent, too, of octopus and pony,
of reefs and villages, once it was strange
simply for being not a rock itself—
not rock, but a blank sleep on a rock shelf.
And, deeply sympathetic to the rock,
to sea and sea dust washing through its skin,
it knows, although it doesn't know it knows,
that minds and their milieux are all one thing.
Some see its way of thinking; most, not yet.
Still, one day, just by living, all will find
reason enough within themselves to think
the single thought forever in its mind.
The Crossroads
This is the place it happened. It was here.
You might not know it was unless you knew.
All day the cars blow past and disappear.
This is the place it happened. It was here.
Look at the sparkling dust, the oily smear.
Look at the highway marker, still askew.
This is the place it happened. It was here.
You might not know it was unless you knew.
The Cement Plant
The cement plant was like a huge still
nailed in gray corrugated panels
and left out forty-five years ago
in the null center of a meadow
to tax itself to remorseless death
near a black stream and briars, where
from the moment it began to breathe
it began falling apart and burning.
But it still went, and the men were paid.
The plant made dust. Impalpably fine,
hung in a tawny alkaline cloud,
swept into drifts against mill-room piers,
frozen by rain on silo ledges,
dust was its first and its final cause.
Pinups were traced on their car windshields.
Dust gave them jobs, and killed some of them.
Late into evening their teeth grated.
Its product was dust, its problem dust.
The thing was blind to all its own ends
but the one. Men's ordinary lives,
measured out on a scale alien
to that on which its life was measured,
were spent in crawling the junk machine,
fitting new gaskets, screws, and bearings,
deceiving it toward the mood required
for it to avail and pay. Somehow
it did. None cheered it. It sustained them.
The Hill
On the crowded hill bordering the mill,
across the shallow stream, nearer than they seem,
they wait and will be waiting.
Rain. The small smilax is the same to the fly
as the big bush of lilacs exploding nearby.
The rain may be abating.
On the quiet hill beside the droning mill,
across the dirty stream, nearer than they seem,
they wait and will be waiting.
The glass-eyed cicada drones in the linden draped like a tent
above three polished stones. Aphids swarm at the scent
of the yellow petals.
A bird comes to prod a clump of wet fur.
The ferns idiotically nod when she takes it away with her.
Something somewhere settles.
On the crowded hill bordering the mill
is our best cemetery, pretty, but not very.
All are welcome here.
Sun finds a bare teak box on the tidy green plot.
It finds lichen-crusted blocks fringed with forget-me-not.
Angels preen everywhere.
On the crowded hill bordering the mill
is our best cemetery, pretty, but not very.
All are welcome here.
Joe Pipe
The black cowboy hat
with buffalo-nickel trim,
the fine nose and mustache that sat
under the wide brim
like a dopey disguise,
and, out of sight of the sun,
the black button eyes
fixed far ahead of him
in deep thought, or none:
that man was something to see,
one large boot, also black,
up on his delicate knee
as he spread out and settled back
on a park bench or, standing to go,
raised to his ear again
the dumb radio
with the hole at the back
where the batteries should have been;
or at the bowling alley,
in awkward company
of others like him—though really,
hatless and bootless, he
might be their overseer,
sliding to a full stop like
a bright Olympic skier
in a lip-balm ad on TV ...
and, after, the rumbling, the strike;
then the shoe desk, and one beside him
to help with left and right;
and outside, from his vest, the star item,
brought matter-of-factly to light:
the pipe, trick answer to
the question of his face,
hung like the tail of a Q
from his solemn overbite
as though books and a fireplace
awaited somewhere, though
his pipe was less plausible than
even the radio,
being plastic. Good if that man,
who would have no spouse or car,
could feel that a toy, along
with the clothes and the boots that he wore,
made him like other men.
Also, he was not wrong.
The Forecast
Here nothing moves across the even sky,
and nothing moves the mile of dusty corn.
Nearby, the red house sleeps beneath a tree,
the house he put there, near the pine he planted
some past September, waiting for the weather
and corn to work out all the final details.
March lion.
March lamb.
April showers.
May flowers.
Soon June's
soft scion.
Then August's
battering ram.
October sours
May bowers.
Down in the Valley
It was her first time coming home from college.
She headed downtown for a drink or two.
Her girlfriend went home early. That was Christmas.
Now, under sapling pine trees in the clearing,
snowdrops are coming back to their old places.
They had been gone a lifetime. Now they stand,
poised like a choir on the verge of singing:
Nature is just. There's nothing left to fear.
The worst thing that can happen happened here.
The Fair
The fair rolled into town surprisingly
intact, like a plate unbreakable because
it has been dropped and glued so many times
that it is all glue and no plate. The fair
was no fair. But, oh, it was a thrill!
The fair slid into town just as a clown
slides into pants. The fit was loose but right.
The sheriff had a job directing traffic.
The barber was the sheriff for a night,
and people paid to see a human ape.
They frowned to find her happy and alive.
The fair spilled into town like a box of tacks.
Later that month, in with the rest at church,
were people no one knew,
though none could tell exactly who was who.
Work Song
This fastening, unfastening, and heaving—
this is our life. Whose life is it improving?
It topples some. Some others it will toughen.
Work is the safest way to fail, and often
the simplest way to love a son or daughter.
We come. We carp. We're fired. We worry later.
That man is strange. His calipers are shiny.
His hands are black. For lunch he brings baloney,
and, offered coffee, answers, "Thank you, no."
That man, with nothing evil left to do
and two small skills to stir some interest up,
fits in his curtained corner of the shop.
The best part of our life is disappearing
into the john to sneak a smoke, or staring
at screaming nonstop mills, our eyes unfocused,
or standing judging whose sick joke is sickest.
Yet nothing you could do could break our silence.
We are a check. Do not expect a balance.
That is a wrathful man becoming older,
a nobody like us, turned mortgage holder.
We stay until the bell. That man will stay
ten minutes more, so no one can complain.
Each day, by then, he's done exactly ten.
Ten what, exactly, no one here can say.
Elegy
Yes, we were kind, and brave, and honest once.
Beige foyer to tan restroom to beige chapel,
the fifty folding chairs, the eighteen people,
and, somewhere, him. My suit coat pulls my shoulders.
Monica, Bob, Amanda, Mike, and Pam,
how terrible to see you all again.
The reverend, too: an incorrect assumption.
And, laid apart beneath the track lights, what?
Collarless white tuxedo shirt. A mullet.
The unimaginably bad foundation.
Comic books, slipped in by his long-lost father,
whom someone told his son liked comic books.
A small laugh, burning nose, and in my eyes
a little water. Home. Feet somewhat sore.
Later tonight, the full cost being paid,
we gather in a dark place outside town
and, in accordance with his simple will,
Monica, Pam, Amanda, Mike, and Bob,
Pistol and Doll, Shadow and Rumour, and I
drink up what little money he had saved.
And now we're mean. We're terrified. We lie.
On the Way to Church School
The girls and boys
that stammer by
at one o'clock
stretch half a block.
Clouds follow them;
also, the steeple.
The tallest and others
waiting to see
what the tallest will do
tie parkas of blue,
yellow, or red
around their waists.
Already lost,
one boy had tied
a parka of red
around his head.
That boy now lies
shoved on the grass.
Ms. Bell, who ably
shepherds them,
and Mrs. Stack,
in the way-back,
coolly chide
but do not holler.
The smallest pause
with giant eyes.
The sidewalk glints
at the innocents
so like people
only smaller.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Accepting the Disaster by Joshua Mehigan. Copyright © 2014 Joshua Mehigan. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Here
The Smokestack
Fire Safety
The Sponge
The Crossroads
The Cement Plant
The Hill
Joe Pipe
The Forecast
Down in the Valley
The Fair
Work Song
Elegy
On the Way to Church School
Sad Stories
Father Birmingham
The Bowl
At Home
Citation
Epitaph Carved on a Shin Bone
Cold Turkey
The Dream Job
Psalm
How Strange, How Sweet
Heard at the Men's Mission
Try
The Polling Place
The Professor
The Library
The Orange Bottle
The News
The Payphone
The Chemist
Believe It
Fanatics
Accepting the Disaster
Shark's Tooth