Fire Season: Poems

by Patrick Coleman

Overview

Occasioned by the birth of a first child and originally spoken aloud into a digital audio recorder on the poet’s long commute between the art museum where he worked and his home in a neighborhood burned in the Witch Creek Fire of 2007, each of the poems in Patrick Coleman’s first book resists the confusions of twenty-first-century parenthood, marriage, art, and commerce. By turns conversational and anxious, metaphysical and self-mocking, celebratory yet permeated by an awareness of life’s flickering ephemerality, Fire Season is a search for gratitude among reasons to be afraid—and proof that a person can pass through the fires and come out the other side alive.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781946482150
Publisher:	Tupelo Press
Publication date:	12/01/2018
Pages:	112
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Patrick Coleman is the assistant director of the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination at the University of California-San Diego. He earned a BA at the University of California-Irvine and an MFA at Indiana University, and he was editor/contributor for the exhibition catalogue The Art of Music and a contributor to Into India: South Asian Paintings from the San Diego Museum of Art. His literary writing has appeared in Zócalo Public Square, Black Warrior Review, ZYZZYVA, and The Writer's Chronicle, and his first novel, The Churchgoer, will be published by Harper Perennial in 2019. He lives in Ramona, California, with his wife and two daughters.

Table of Contents

I

Fire Season 3

Deer in the Break 5

Being Lost 7

The Fifth of May 9

The Usual 11

Audio Tour for Wherever You Are 13

Ground and Figure 15

Breaking Ground 17

Fire Season 19

TRKLDWN 21

Equivalents 23

Bucolic 25

Inaccurate Art History 27

Sod, Stars 29

Developmental Grammar 31

II

Alice, Wonder 35

That Saying 37

Developmental Grammar 39

On Ice 41

Equivalents 43

Developmental Grammar 45

And Now I Am Their Song 47

Arse Poetica 49

Audio Tour for Wherever You Are 51

The Last Ocean 53

Developmental Grammar 55

Abide with Me 57

Developmental Grammar / Equivalents 59

Leda and … 61

Bibliographic Research 63

Developmental Grammar 65

III

Deaccessioning 69

Snot Epistemology (Part I) 71

Snot Epistemology (Part II) 73

Audio Tour for Wherever You Are 75

Equivalents 77

Eat Eat 79

Fire Season 81

Curing Olives 83

Fire Season 85

Equivalents 87

False Equivalents 89

Push 91

Commuted 93

Fire Season 95

Art Sources and Permissions 97

Acknowledgments 102