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Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9781636280271 |
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Publisher: | Red Hen Press |
Publication date: | 05/24/2022 |
Pages: | 104 |
Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Farthest Side
Some afternoons, in the small space of time between my coming home from school and his heading off to work, second shift, and maybe some of third (what did I know of those austere days),
my father would have a question waiting for me.
We couldn’t usually find a way to get beyond all the history that divided us, that kept us far from each other, for such a small house.
But when I came home, he would sometimes have the paper open to The Far Side,
usually one that went a bit further over the edge,
and would ask if I understood this one.
We had our dark favorites that were fairly clear.
The engorged snake stuck in the crib with the teddy bear.
The spider web at the bottom of the slide—
“If we pull this off, we’ll eat like kings.”
But the fact that he asked me, even back then,
about the more complicated ones, believing I would know about natural selection, space, modern art, or poetry meant more to me than I would have admitted,
more than I even realized at the time.
When we talked about Cow Poetry, it went beyond the cow’s damning the electric fence. The pilots wondering what a mountain goat was doing in that cloud bank ahead brought us to the moment outside the frame.
Maybe Larson intended that a few of these,
like the meat in the bowl on the window table,
or Cow Tools, with its unrecognizable objects,
would resist any quick interpretation and just get people talking.
Outback
I was grown before I knew the moon waxed and waned that way,
waxed in a D and waned in a C.
Since no one ever showed me,
I showed my children, probably from the first time we looked at the night sky.
Though you might have known this scientifically,
sometimes you have to go to the other side of the world,
travel through the outback, feeling small again and far away, before you discover the moon waxes and wanes somewhere else in the opposite way.
Table of Contents
I Questions of Time and Direction
Just Before Dawn 17
Measure by Time 18
Remotely 19
Hippocampus (Elliptical Scans from Space) 20
The Factory (Questions from Outer Space) 22
Questions of Time and Direction 24
Field Notes from the Biolayer 26
Spatial Equations 27
Listening in Deep Space 28
Navigating the Questions 29
So Much Depends 30
Expendable 32
Time Won't Do It 33
Sticks and Stones 34
In the Rain 35
Babes in the Wood 36
Three Seasons 37
Hiatus 38
II Notice from Another Dimension
Sleeping Dogs 41
Baby Out with the Bathwater 42
Kwick Assess 43
The Multiverse 44
Under the Rug 46
The Slide 47
Tritina in the Time of the Machine 48
Assimilation 49
In the Mirror 50
Notice from Another Dimension 51
Isn't poetry all about perfection? 52
Three Surrealist Women and the Skins of an Orchestra 53
Love-spinning 54
Carousel 55
Kummerspeck 56
Changing Reality 57
III The Farthest Side
The Farthest Side 61
The Typewriter 61
Pantoum on a Paper Moon 64
Circle in the Sand 65
One Early Morning 66
Planting Cape Florida, Key Biscayne 67
Swamp Roses 68
This Old Thing 69
Letters from La Paz 70
How They Arrived 72
Recovering the Lost 73
Library of Veria, Greece 74
Learning to Breathe 76
Haiku Petroglyphs 78
Elemental Trail 79
On Foot 80
Southern Cross 81
Outback 82
IV Time in the Wilderness
The First Sea 85
Astronaut Training 86
Birth Announcement 87
Counting Two 88
Questions from Four Dimensions 89
Giant Children 90
Spaceship with Saint Giovannino 91
Interplanetary Spelling Bee 92
Living with Aliens 94
Zero Hour 95
High Noon at the Remote Corral 96
Finding Home 97
Under the Lawrence Tree 98
Short Subjects with Long Titles (Epigrams on Art, Poetics, and Philosophy) 99
Time in the Wilderness 103