Once, Then

by Andrea Scarpino

Overview

In her debut full-length poetry collection, Andrea Scarpino’s elegies move between personal and political loss, between science, myth, and spirituality, and between lyric intensity and narrative clarity. At their heart is a longing for those we have lost, and an acknowledgement that loss irrevocably changes us and what we understand of the world. Blending mythological figures such as Persephone and Achilles, scientific approaches to knowledge learned from her microbiologist father, and a deep ambivalence regarding religious ideas of death and afterlife, Scarpino’s poems invite us to examine the world, our own place in it, and what to make of its continual collapse.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781597099745
Publisher:	Red Hen Press
Publication date:	03/15/2014
Pages:	80
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Andrea Scarpino received an MFA in Creative Writing from The Ohio State University. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and published in numerous journals, including The Cincinnati Review, Connecticut Review, The Los Angeles Review, PANK, and Prairie Schooner. She is the author of the chapbook The Grove Behind (Finishing Line Press, 2009), is a faculty member with Union Institute and University’s Cohort Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Studies, and is a weekly contributor for the blog Planet of the Blind. She lives in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.

Read an Excerpt

Self Portrait as Achilles
 
When he told of my birth, my father
always said, And there were your toes
 
pointing straight—astonishment, two feet
that wouldn’t flex no matter how he pushed
 
against my soles. Plaster casts to my hips
then surgery, a cut down each heel
 
to lengthen tendons, give flexibility.
For years, braces, orthopedic shoes,
 
examining rooms where doctors noted
each degree of movement gained.
 
My father would sit in a black steel chair
until the doctors left, then kneel on the floor
 
in front of me, pull on my ankle socks,
cradle each scarred foot in his hands.

Table of Contents

1

Stone Work 17

With Lines from Nâzim Hikmet 18

My Father and the Nuns, 1956 19

Self-Portrait as Achilles 20

Hover 21

After the Stroke, Poplar Trees 22

Omniscience 23

Self-Portrait as Pomegranate 24

Too much of anything 25

Afire 26

Hearing 27

Madonna of the Pomegranate 28

Voiceless Sijo 29

Rigor Mortis 30

Morgue 31

Detritus 32

Tissues 33

Relative Motion 34

2

Au Clair de la Lune 37

Elegy for an apple tree 38

The Grove Behind 39

Her Hair 40

Love as Stained Glass 41

Homily 42

Blood Sijo 43

August 6, Hiroshima 44

Practice Runs 45

By the Sagebrush 46

71 South 50

Belief 51

Breath 52

Self-Portrait as Stone 53

Diamond Sijo 54

3

First Spring After 57

Persephone 58

Record 60

Thunderbird 61

Perish 62

Vineyard Sijo 63

Comfort 64

The First Year 65

Things You Never Say 70

Love as a Crow's Iridescence 71

Holy Family Orphanage 72

Father as Terroir 73

Etymology of Goodbye 74

Funeral Sijo 75

Grace 76

Afterward 77

Editorial Reviews

Poetry never brings back those we’ve lost, but the best poems of mourning forge dignity in a newly emptied world. The craft, restraint, and lyric insistence of Andrea Scarpino’s poems give Once, Then an Orphic intensity. This book is gorgeous, and necessary.”
—Don Bogen

“In these Orphic songs of grief, Andrea Scarpino honors those whose deaths break empathy wide open in us. Two very personal losses embark Scarpino on a lyrical underworld journey, where she traverses the atrocities we know as Hiroshima, Auschwitz, the Manson murders and others, in order to create her own ‘etymology of goodbye.’ With Once, Then, Andrea Scarpino balances private and public, the human and the mythic scale, thereby restoring our classical notion of the elegiac poem.”
—Kathy Fagan, author of Lip

From the Publisher