Crude Angel: Poems

by Suzanne Cleary

Overview

Suzanne Cleary’s fourth poetry collection “Crude Angel” moves between profundity and play as it considers such varied subjects as the artist Degas’s brother, Lawrence Welk, and the Burt Reynolds Museum. This poetry collection considers wit and meaning in history, visual art, and popular culture and in contemporary American life. The book includes work previously published in such venues as Georgia Review, Southern Review, and Village Voice.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781943491179
Publisher:	BkMk Press
Publication date:	11/20/2018
Pages:	90
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.22(d)

About the Author

Suzanne Cleary was born and raised in Binghamton, New York, but has lived in the metropolitan New York City area for over 30 years. Her full-length poetry collections are Crude Angel and Beauty Mark (BkMk Press), Trick Pear and Keeping Time (Carnegie Mellon). Her awards include a Pushcart Prize, the Cecil Hemley Memorial Award of the Poetry Society of America, and the John Ciardi Prize (for Beauty Mark). She teaches as core faculty in the low-residency MFA in Creative Writing Program of Converse College.

Table of Contents

I

11 Horse Jacket

13 Elm Street

14 Bird of Paradise

16 Apparently, There Are Hundreds

18 Poem for Achille Degas

20 Love Letter

22 Perseids Meteor Shower

23 Night Sky Team

25 Snake River

26 Angel of Light

28 My Family Rides Horses Once and Never Again

29 Lawrence Welk

31 Toychestra

32 Making Love While Watching a Documentary on Lewis and Clark

II

35 I Have Never Slept with an Animal

36 Sausage Candle

37 Burt Reynolds Museum

38 Lassie

40 Art & Life

41 Thank You, Morgan Fairchild

43 Cross-Country

interior, Crude Angel.indd 7 10/26/18 3:46 PM

III

47 Election Day Robocall

48 One-Day University

50 Against Nostalgia

52 Gertrude Stein

53 You Never Know

56 My Father’s Feet

58 First Place

60 Toy Harp

62 I Will Wash Your Stockings

63 Giorgio Morandi Spent His Life

64 Turquoise Shoes

65 Sally, I Need You to Stand beside Me

67 The Sun

69 Woodpecker

70 Famously Inhospitable

71 Edward Hopper’s Paint Box

72 Secret of Happiness

74 Truthfully

75 Song After Years for the Couple Who Owned the Country Pub

76 20th Century Suitcase

78 Nest

81 Theremin

83 Crude Angel

85 Spearmint

87 Dubbing Room

Editorial Reviews

In Suzanne Cleary's moving new book of poems, Crude Angel, the imagination

enters into a tender dialogue with the world. Now the world has the last word, as

wish gives way to fact, and now the imagination steps forward to ;fill the landscape

with what is missing. The poems seem so homely and open in the particulars used to

ground their shifting perspectives that the reader can't help but be drawn in.

—Carl Dennis

In these headlong, often hilarious, intensely pleasurable poems, Suzanne Cleary offers

us Degas's brother ''twisted on [his] back in the wet grass of morning,'' serving

day after day as the model for a fallen jockey, and the theremin ''played by waving

one’s hands // in the air surrounding [it]… / …a song made entirely/of the world's

poor materials // somehow charged.'' The poet's work is humble, the poems seem to

say, but she goes at it with a passion worthy of her many awkward characters. She's

faithful to the world as it is, its ''poor materials,'' charging them with her humor and

quixotic imagination.

—Dana Roeser

Suzanne Cleary's witty, meditative lines interrogate nostalgias of personal

and collective memory; luminaries as divergent as Gertude Stein, Leon

Theremin, and Lawrence Welk offer compelling reminders of the zeal

and labor involved in making art. From the sublime vistas of natural

landscapes to the gleaming interiors of Woolworth’s ''buttery air''

to dubbing rooms to handwritten letters exchanged between lovers

that provide ''practice for loving/;first the world, then ourselves,''

Crude Angel tracks the heart’s urgent aspirations in poems of high

ambition and rich reward.

—Jane Satter;feld, Apocalypse Mix and Her Familiars

From the Publisher