I Was Waiting to See What You Would Do First

by Angie Mazakis

Overview

Finalist, 2020 Miller Williams Poetry Prize

Like nesting dolls, the poems in I Was Waiting to See What You Would Do First contain scenes within scenes, inviting the reader over and over again to sharpen focus on minute details that, though small, reveal much about human perception and imagination.

Angie Mazakis handles these layers of revelation with great tenderness. Her poems wander in the way that a curious mind wanders, so that even though they often end very far from where they started, they are anchored in the familiar, referring to experiences we all share: a moment of distraction in a coffee shop imagining a conversation with someone across the room, or a narrative built around the expressions of the cartoon people on the airplane seatback safety guide.

I Was Waiting to See What You Would Do First is a testament to the notion that whether through a cosmic or microscopic lens, “You just see one moment; you just see now.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781682261347
Publisher:	University of Arkansas Press
Publication date:	03/02/2020
Series:	Miller Williams Poetry Prize
Pages:	103
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Angie Mazakis's poems have appeared in The New Republic, Boston Review, The Iowa Review, Best New Poets, Washington Square Review, Columbia Journal, and Lana Turner Journal. She is a doctoral student in creative writing at Ohio University.
 

Table of Contents

Series Editor's Preface vii

Oh My Kidneys 3

Love and Containment 5

Every Miss Universe Contestant Is from Earth 7

Dreamsickness 8

Illusions of Self-Motion 9

People with No Sight Still See Ghosts 12

I Am Looking for You Here 14

There's No Face for This 17

Index of Continuity Errors 20

Aircraft Safety Information Pamphlet 22

The Woman Who Lives inside My GPS Directs Her Thoughts Inward 24

I Miss the Friday Train and Have to Take the Monday Train 26

RFI (Request for Information) 28

I'll Never Get to Say 33

Excavating the Foundation 35

What Was Discovered After the Snow Melted 36

Chance 38

A Disaster with Angie Telephone's Name on It 40

Call On Janus 43

Possibility 45

Variable Expressions 46

Pretending to Be Asleep 48

Owen and Paul 50

Where Home Is for Now 53

In Paris, the Sun Is a Chandelier 56

Red String Theory 58

Hoarders Cento 60

Ben's Face Is Saying Something He Doesn't Want It to Say 62

How to Take a River with You 64

Shifts 66

Now the Day Is Over 67

Red Full Moon 69

Acknowledgments 71

Notes 73

Editorial Reviews

There are no apparent limits to the imaginative reach of Angie Mazakis.”
—Billy Collins

“Human relationships are riddled with nuances. Mostly we drift along sensing that we’ve missed or misinterpreted some of the signals coming from the eyes and voices of others. Angie Mazakis’s poetry is distinguished by her fascinated versatility in pondering such signals. She does this with a melancholy comic verve in poems like ‘Chance’ and ‘Index of Continuity Errors’ and ‘Ben’s Face is Saying Something He Doesn’t Want It to Say.’ Her alertness to the complexity of interpersonal tensions gives exciting life to I Was Waiting to See What You Would Do First—beginning with the book’s funny and touching title. Readers will find not only insights but solace in Mazakis’s wary but brave meditations on human connection.”
—Mark Halliday, author of Losers, Dream On

“Reading Angie Mazakis’s tender debut collection, I can’t help but feel these poems originate from a place poems rarely do, a nucleic heart held together by an inimitable imagination and unabashed honesty. We truly are in the best of hands, too, guided by a speaker—the more curious voice inside the head of the voice inside your head—who wants only for us to understand them a little better. To come a little closer. And that’s the real triumph of this book: how Mazakis approaches each moment in this life with fierce generosity, weaving entire worlds of people and possibilities into them so that we might emerge on the other side with a more empathetic love for others and ourselves. This book is here for us. This poet, for our wholeness.”
—Peter Twal, author of Our Earliest Tattoos

“Mazakis’s poetry affirms the reason we come to art: for a particular relationship between ourselves and others, for an encounter with the real—to experience stories and songs that we ourselves could not tell or sing. ”
—Hannah VanderHart, Cleveland Review of Books

From the Publisher