Blue Flame

by Emily Pettit

Overview

Emily Pettit is not afraid to confront the greatest of our universal experiences. Her Blue Flame is about time, space, loss, love, memory, fear, and staying alive. In this exquisite collection, she explores what happens to us in this world in the ways that only poetry can capture.
“Blue Flame is a book about consciousness, about what it means to re-see the world all around us in a world full of ultimate vision. Because when the book tells us, “You are exactly where you are / supposed to be,” we can believe it. Because these are poems that know everything and want to tell us so. Read this book and you will enter a heartbreaking world where beauty never ends, maybe thankfully. . . . In this book, she takes all of the very stuff of being alive and makes it a sound that seems like music but is better than music. Read this book and you will come alive again.”—Dorothea Lasky, author of Thunderbird

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780887486487
Publisher:	Carnegie-Mellon University Press
Publication date:	03/15/2019
Pages:	64
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Emily Pettit is an editor for Factory Hollow Press and jubilat. She has taught and lectured at Columbia University, the University of Massachusetts, and Elms College. Pettit is also the author of Goat in the Snow. She lives in Sunderland, Massachusetts.

Table of Contents

I

Object in Our Conscience 13

Because You Can Have This Idea About Being Afraid of Something 14

I Am Asking You to Look at Me, Touch Me, Talk to Me 15

The Eye of the Fly 16

There Is Something Human About Wanting to Hold a Fork That Size 17

Hostile and Aggressive Feelings 18

After Calming Down You Have an Old Feeling 19

All of the Animals Were There 20

We Are Hearing the Loudest Animal Be Its Loudest 21

A Name That Haunts You Your Name That Haunts You 22

Keep Your Face Away from My Face 23

To Leave Half a Mind Is a Gift You Sometimes Give Yourself 24

A Fox's Tail Is Called a Brush 25

An Agreement Requires an Offer and Acceptance 26

The Heart Is My Favorite Organ But Not Because It Is Grand 27

II

Blue Flame 31

After Vision 32

Observing a Tree You Once Knew and Now No Longer Know 33

Idea 34

You Keep Asking What I Want and I Don't Know What I Want 35

The Opposition of Objects 36

Bug 37

They Will Call You Different Things 38

Indignant 39

Water I Have Seen a Duck 40

The Fear of an Accelerating Something 41

Familiar Qualities We Admire 42

Panic 43

Lego Lady You Have Two Heads 44

Tiny 45

That That That 46

III

Hands Like Lighters 49