Central Air: Poems

by Mike Puican

Overview

Set in the urban Chicago landscape, Central Air explores the human challenge of living with strong desires, limited knowledge, and no saving direction. The voices in this mix of elegies and soft litanies negotiate lives within the strangeness and unpredictability of each moment. In every case, language is a swift prayer, ode, and lyric. Chicago is an intensely experienced, blue-collar homeplace where injustice is a given. The poems are stern, compressed, and unsentimental. But they are also empathic to human shortcomings and doubts, scored in unobtrusive consistency in both voice and language.
 
Puican’s focus on the city, its people and underbellied spaces, pays homage in the tradition of the great Chicago masters: Carl Sandburg, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Campbell McGrath. This contemporary Chicago son finds his own place with lyrical integrity.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780810142077
Publisher:	Northwestern University Press
Publication date:	08/15/2020
Pages:	80
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

MIKE PUICAN has published poems in Poetry, Bloomsbury Review, Crab Orchard Review, and New England Review, among others. His work has also been featured on WBEZ, Chicago’s NPR affiliate. Puican was a member of the 1996 Chicago Slam Team and holds an M.F.A. in poetry from Warren Wilson College. As a longtime board member of the Guild Literary Complex in Chicago, he has been deeply involved in supporting and promoting other Chicago writers. He also leads poetry workshops at St. Leonard’s House for formerly incarcerated men and at the federal Metropolitan Correctional Center in Chicago.
 

Table of Contents

The Lawyer Says 1

***

And the Gauchos Sing 5

Red Line 6

Joke 7

Bill's Blues 8

Still Life with Pears 9

Tequila and Steve 10

Englewood in Bloom 12

Sudden Rain 13

Sunset at a Lake 14

Immigrant Grasses 15

Friday Night Poker 17

Man Digging a Sidewalk 18

Chicago 19

Unbridled 21

Clark and Belmont Ghazal 22

Vi Redd at the Clef Club 23

Central Air 24

Somniloquy 29

All-Night Delivery 30

Loved One 31

Abandoned Church 32

Psalm 33

When He's Dead 34

Poem with Many Endings 35

The Magi Ask for Directions 36

The Priest Was Either Discussing Death 37

Drying the Dishes 38

Subtle Is the Lord 39

Good News 40

Light in Hell 41

Fall 43

Settlement 44

Dating Again 46

Why I'm in Marketing 47

30 Seconds 48

Nonfiction 49

La Calle de los Salvados 50

Knife in the Wall 52

The Call 53

Abundance 54

We Are Part of a Story That Is Far from Ending 56

Eden Is Lost 57

Here 59

The Current 60

The Dusk 61

Saint Prisca 62

Acknowledgments 63

Notes 67

Editorial Reviews

In Mike Puican’s striking debut, Central Air, poems not only question our surroundings but allow our surroundings to question us—Chicago becoming as central a character as any other. With vivid imagery and a fine control of rhetoric, Puican’s poems are as strong giving life to a bar joke as they are representing the challenges of addressing the divine.” —C. Dale Young, author of The Affliction: A Novel in Stories
 

"Mike Puican’s poems are stern, compressed, and unsentimental. But they are also big-hearted and empathic, even when their evocations of human failing are at their most acute. The poems succeed through an unobtrusive mastery of craft, surprising turns of imagery, narrative precision, and an unerring consistency of voice. The book is also a masterly evocation of contemporary Chicago, a worthy successor to collections such as Sandburg's Chicago Poems or Brook's A Street in Bronzeville. This is notable company indeed." —David Wojahn, author of Interrogation Palace: New and Selected Poems 1982-2004

"Mike Puican's Central Air is filled with vividly exuberant and deeply empathetic images of life. He has shaped the cheer and sorrows of hundreds of human moments into a bright constellation of poetic energy and inventiveness. His way of capturing spiritual as well as carnal intensities is striking and original. What a great debut! And a great Chicago book, as well." —Reginald Gibbons, author of How Poems Think

“When I read Mike Puican’s Central Air, I can feel Chicago in my bones like hot sidewalks and gridded streets. Here is a Midwest crooner with a river of Red Line in his blood. Here is a catechism of Father-prayers and tenement doorways. Reader, ‘Tonight the crack in the asphalt is speaking to me,’ and its voice is wonderment wandering from Mike’s town to yours. Wherever you are, open these pages to find a map back to a place where the wind is ruler of everything it touches, a place that ‘twists its way into our hearts.’” —Tyehimba Jess, author of Olio
 
“Here we have it—keenly addictive chronicles of the Chicago poet and his Chicago brethren, living their just-ain’t-no-livin’-like-this Chicago lives against that utterly iconic Chicago backdrop. Mike Puican’s homage to that most relentless of cities is nothing less than revelatory, and the poetic landscape will have to shift in appreciation.” —Patricia Smith, author of Incendiary Art (Northwestern, 2017)
 

From the Publisher