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Overview
An exciting first collection of poetry from an emerging talent, Andrew Feld’s Citizen was a winner of the 2003 National Poetry Series Open Competition, selected by esteemed poet Ellen Bryant Voigt. For over twenty years, the National Poetry Series has discovered many new and emerging voices and has been instrumental in launching the careers of poets and writers such as Billy Collins, Mark Doty, Denis Johnson, Cole Swensen, Thylias Moss, Mark Levine, and Dionisio Martinez.
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9780060726034 |
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Publisher: | HarperCollins |
Publication date: | 06/29/2004 |
Series: | National Poetry Series |
Pages: | 96 |
Product dimensions: | 5.31(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.27(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Citizen
Poems
On Fire
Having been taught by fools, how else could I have ended up
but as I am? a man who panics at the sound of his own voice,
a blusterer, afraid that within the five-pointed maple leaf there lie
another name he never knew; ready, always, to be found wrong
Listen: in my tenth year they put me in a room where one plane
watched another plane fly over a city. It was morning in both
places. In black & white at first the explosion looked like water
rising. Captured, they say, on film, as in: pulled out of time
so we can rewind it and watch it happen again, as in a memory,
as in: this is a memory we all have, these are our family picture
There was that kind of shame. As if the fire really had been stolen.
And sitting on the floor there was one boy who even earlier
that year came home to find his mother hanging from a rope
in the kitchen. What didn't he know that he needed this film
to teach him? Already what he knew was enough to terrify
the teachers, so that they couldn't look at him. But they also
couldn't not look at him. As if he was an obscene pleasure.
And he was beautiful. Complete. But what he carried in him
seeped out as hate for anyone of the same sex as his mother.
It was that simple: even a fourth-grade mind could understand.
So the girls stayed away. And from the other side of the common
room, where the books full of numbers being added, subtracted,
and divided were kept, our new teacher watched, helpless, knowing
he also needed this knowledge, but she couldn't give it to him.
Which might be why she let me touch her. Because she couldn't
get near him and my head against the antique white lace of her
dress was a good enough almost. Her hair was light brown, if I
remember correctly. Innocent is supposed to mean free from hurt
but it can also mean you don't know what you're doing. As when
I felt that touching her wasn't enough and I wanted to press closer,
until someone felt pain, or until I passed through her dress and found
myself inside her. It didn't matter if she was an adult and I was ten:
what I wanted wasn't sex. Or not what I have learned to think sex
is. Her dress was made of a material called vintage, which meant
that although it had managed to avoid all the minor catastrophes
of red wine stain and hook snag, along with the major disasters
of history, no one had treated the cloth with chemicals, to make it
flame retardant. And on the whole length of the hand-sewn inner seam
that started at her wrist and ran all the way down to her ankle,
no one had remembered to place even one small label warning:
if you touch the sleeve of this garment to the still-hot coils
of an electric stove, it will explode. Which is what happened.
There's the kind of scream you hear in movies. What I heard
twenty-seven years ago didn't sound anything like that. It was
sharper and can't be recorded. No matter how many times
you rewind the film. You keep going back and each time
there's a little less there. Until the memory has become
the event. And how you feel about the memory. THe materials
have burnt away. There was so much fabric and all of it on fire.
Her hair too, which was long, as I remember. She came running
from the faculty kitchen, as if she could escape what she was
turning into. But all she did was excite and encourage the flames.
Poems. Copyright © by Andrew Feld. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.