Animal Days

Animal Days

by Joshua Beckman

Overview

Enacting both the pain and heightened awareness of a body in crisis, Joshua Beckman’s latest collection of carefully assembled poetic fragments seeks to elucidate the synthetic reality of being sick and being medicated. Written from inside of illness and gathered over several years, these fragments or moments invite readers to contemplate how the compromised body transforms our conceptions of selfhood and our sense of the world. With a sincere reaching curiosity, the poems present a record of daily experience, but with the constant undermining presence of decay, memory, and death.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781950268092
Publisher: Wave Books
Publication date: 01/05/2020
Pages: 100
Product dimensions: 5.40(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Joshua Beckman was born in New Haven, Connecticut. He is the author of many books, including The Lives of the Poems and Three Talks (Wave Books, 2018), The Inside of an Apple, Take It, Shake, Your Time Has Come, and two collaborations with Matthew Rohrer: Nice Hat. Thanks. and Adventures While Preaching the Gospel of Beauty. He is editor-in-chief at Wave Books and has translated numerous works of poetry and prose, including Micrograms by Jorge Carrera Andrade, 5 Meters of Poems (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010) by Carlos Oquendo de Amat, and Poker (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2008) by Tomaž Šalamun, which was a finalist for the PEN America Poetry in Translation Award. He also co-edited Supplication: Selected Poems of John Wieners (Wave Books, 2015).

Read an Excerpt

Something terrible


and sanguine


writ into


the plan




I can't


really even believe


where I am –




plant note


raw + soaked




whatever strange


knockings around there are


I hear them




3am


and from the moonlit street


a resonating sound


bellied out




not that I was


or should have been


to sleep already




but those nail-footed


rat creatures


got me here




standing at the window


hands in my hair




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