Sidebend World

by Charles Harper Webb

Overview

With eleven full-length books and a spate of major prizes, Charles Harper Webb—once a well-kept secret in the poetry underground—has gained national recognition as a writer of poems that are complex yet reader-friendly. Sidebend World shows clearly why Webb has been called one of the most inventive, incisive, and psychologically astute poets writing in the U.S.A. today, as well as one of the most entertaining.    

Webb is celebrated for his use of humor; yet even his funniest poems rise, as the best humor must, from serious concerns. Powered by an uncompromising but compassionate intelligence and an abiding wonder at the beautiful strangeness of the world, Sidebend World explores with clarity and vividness a wide range of emotions—love to hate, tenderness to brutality; yet, above all, Webb is a poet of praise. Metaphors of startling aptness and originality, a distinctive voice at once provocative and endearing, high musicality, propulsive energy, wild imaginative leaps, as well as mastery of diction from lyricism to street-speak, create a reading experience of the first order. These poems go down easy, but pack a wallop. As Robert Frost said poetry should do, Sidebend World "begins in delight and ends in wisdom."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822965619
Publisher:	University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication date:	10/16/2018
Series:	Pitt Poetry Series
Edition description:	1
Pages:	80
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Charles Harper Webb has published twelve books of poetry, including Brain Camp. Webb’s awards in poetry include the Morse Prize, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, the Felix Pollock Prize, and the Benjamin Saltman Prize. Webb is Professor of English at California State University, Long Beach, where he teaches in the MFA Creative Writing Program.

Table of Contents

Sidebend World 3

Part I

Animals in the News 7

Building a Turtle 8

Gratitude for Dark Energy 9

Dominion of Blue 10

Evolution of Love Poetry 12

Snapshots of Alpaca 13

Why I Won't Mind If My Fruit Trees Don't Produce This Year 14

High Winds, Becoming Gusty at Times 15

Box of Butterflies 16

World's Fattest Man Is Missing 17

Have I Got a Script For You 18

Nice People Aren't So Bad 20

When I Think of Happiness 22

"Enthusiasm Should Be Tempered" 23

Subjective 24

Wave 25

Bait Ball 26

Part II

People Think I'm a Gourmet Chef 29

Getting to Know My Neurotransmitters 30

Laughing Song 31

Guys in Chairs 32

Making History 33

A Far Cry from Eli Whitney 34

Custer's Last Handstand 36

Be Careful 37

Poison Oak 38

Fear Factor 39

You Don't Want To Meet the Ai-Urn 40

Here Be Monsters 41

Propitiate 42

Parasites 43

Thirteenth Floor Elevators 45

Recommendations 47

We Rarely Mark When They've Occurred 49

Part III

Swept Away 53

Husband 55

The Woman on the Cover of Glamour Magazine 57

Bouncing the Porpis 58

Snails 60

Stinging Tree 61

Emergency 62

Glass 63

A TV Writer's Best Friend 64

Rain Stick 65

See What You're Missing! 66

"Face-Eating Rottweiler, Free to Good Home" 67

Meanwhile, Back on Mt. Olympus 68

Hero Food 69

Nice Hat 70

Ginsu 72

Turtle Hunt 73

And Yet 74

Down the Bayou 75

Acknowledgments 77

Editorial Reviews

"His unique sidebend slant finds both the humor in the absurdity of our daily lives, and the heart that sustains us through that absurdity. The genius of Webb's poetry is the flurry of synapses that go off on every page—it's pure joy to read his work, to try to keep up with him." —Jim Daniels

"Like the work in his wonderful anthology, Stand Up Poetry, Charles Harper Webb’s glorious new collection, Sidebend World, features poems that indeed do ‘stand up,’ providing a welcome comedy and stability at a time when the only heroes may be sandwiches, when fathers dread a future of clowndom in their young son’s eyes, when fear and fatigue are our constant companions. Equal parts wisdom and whimsy, Webb’s ‘stand up’ poems are constantly doing side bends that tilt the cosmos dangerously, exhilaratingly, off-kilter, then—lovingly, affirmatively—set the world right again." —Ronald Wallace

From the Publisher