Our Earliest Tattoos: Poems

by Peter Twal

Overview

Our Earliest Tattoos destabilizes traditional notions about memory, its permanence and supposed purity, with a simple premise: to remember is to enact violence against the body. Brazen, fragmentary, and intimate, these sonnets depict with astonishing creativity what can come of worshiping the past.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781610756464
Publisher:	University of Arkansas Press
Publication date:	10/19/2018
Series:	Etel Adnan Poetry Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	80
File size:	457 KB

About the Author

Peter Twal is a Jordanian-American electrical engineer from Baton Rouge, Louisiana. His poems have appeared in Best New Poets, Kenyon Review, West Branch, and elsewhere. He is a recipient of the Samuel and Mary Anne Hazo Poetry Award.

Table of Contents

CONTENTS ONE It’s the Memory of Our Betters TWO Like a Sales Force into the Night I Wouldn’t Trade One Stupid Decision Made a Fool on the Road One of the Ways We Show Our Age Years Trying to Get with the Plan & the Next Five Years People Who Are Trying to Be Polite Come Apart in Your Hand If the Sun Comes Up You Forgot What You Meant When You Read What You Said Back to Your House The Way It Does in Bad Films You Look Contorted on Yourself THREE Oh, This Could Be the Last Time So Here I Still Don’t Want to Stagger Home Stand, You Can Sleep on the Plane The Conversation’s Winding Away Come Home to This & with a Face You’re Drunk & the Kids Sewn into Submission There’s Always This FOUR Leave Impossible Tasks If You’re Worried about the Weather Up Late but If You’re Worried Days in the Middle You Drop the First Ten Years Just as Fast as You Can If It’s Crowded, All the Better Your Ridiculous Prop It’s Better When We Pretend We Set Controls for the Heart You Think Over & Over “Hey, I’m Finally Dead” The Moral Kicks In Our Feet, You Spent the First Five Except in Parts That’s How It Starts Weather, Then You Picked the Wrong Place to Stay FIVE Where Are Your Friends Tonight Where Are Your Friends Tonight Where Are Your Friends Tonight If I Could See All My Friends Tonight If I Could See All My Friends Tonight If I Could See All My Friends Tonight If I Could See All My Friends Tonight SIX You Always Knew You were Tired Notes

Editorial Reviews

Reading Peter Twal’s Our Earliest Tattoos, I kept thinking of Wallace Stevens’ famous pronouncement that a poem should ‘resist the intelligence, almost successfully.’ Throughout the book, we see a poet of real intelligence who is also intensely attuned to the wants and needs of language itself. Twal’s sky is ‘so heady, thinking the world of itself’—an earth is summoned, called into being by the ether’s own imagination. There is massive intellect pulsing through these poems, which are inflected by the Mars Rover and LCD Soundsystem and God and gravity and and and. But Twal’s genius is in the way he knows exactly when to yield the floor to imagination, which wonders and wanders through love and loneliness and friendship and grief in a million fascinating ways throughout Our Earliest Tattoos. ‘I will love my monster,’ Twal writes, and then he proceeds to show us.”
—Kaveh Akbar, author of Calling a Wolf a Wolf
 


“Peter Twal’s sonnet sequence explodes inside a pop song. It’s a song of youth and extinction, doomed and well dressed. His instincts are at once traditional and contemporary, his lovers garlanded with strobe light and TV snow and IEDs and birdflight. It’s a thrill to be in the presence of a poet of such a vision, a smith of such lovely smithereens.”
—Joyelle McSweeney, author of The Necropastoral
 


“Peter Twal’s beautiful debut makes wholly new frames for figuring a generation too alive for nostalgia and too awake for solipsism. Like a body from one of Goya’s Pinturas Negras, Twal’s speaker emerges out of his knowing impossibilities of scale into our contemporary moment all while coolly texting Death ‘Your attention/ to detail though.’ Nimble in its music and kind, this book is a reservoir of what we wish we’d said, especially when death texts back.”
—Farid Matuk, author of The Real Horse

From the Publisher