Spilled and Gone: Poems

by Jessica Greenbaum

Overview

Spilled and Gone, Jessica Greenbaum's third collection marries the world through metaphor so that a serrated knife on its back is as harmless as "the ocean on a shiny day," and two crossed daisies in Emily Dickinson's herbarium "might double as the logo /for a roving band of pacifists."
At heart, the poems themselves seek peace through close observation's associative power to reveal cohering relationships and meaning within the 21st century-and during its dark turn. In the everyday tally of "the good against the violence" the speaker asks, "why can't the line around the block on the free night/ at the museum stand for everything, why can't the shriek /of the girls in summer waves . . . / be the call and response of all people living on the earth?" A descendant of the New York school and the second wave, Greenbaum "spills" details that she simultaneously replaces-through the spiraling revelations only poems with an authentic life-force of humanism can nurture.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822965725
Publisher:	University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication date:	04/16/2019
Series:	Pitt Poetry Series
Edition description:	1
Pages:	80
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Jessica Greenbaum is the author of Inventing Difficulty, winner of the Gerald Cable Prize, and The Two Yvonnes, chosen by Paul Muldoon for the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets. She is the recipient of a fellowship from the NEA, and of the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Prize from the Poetry Society of America for the poems in Spilled and Gone. She teaches inside and outside academia, and lives in her native Brooklyn.

https://poemsincommunity.org/

Read an Excerpt

I Was Waiting for You Outside the Post Office 

I was waiting for you outside the post office
A gray morning, nothing special about it
Except everything, since we were traveling
People walked to work pressing their collars
Closer to their throats, a delivery truck
Almost backed into a parked motorcycle
But by the time I recorded it here and looked up
Both gone. One of this city’s oversized
Pigeons, stocky in a brown turtleneck and
Gray bottom, hustled like a man-in-motion
Among the chimney pots, and no matter the
Stillness of the pale yellow buildings (a hue
Mythically, or stubbornly, without analogue)
No matter the rows of stillness you could tell
The whole city was moving slightly as if
Under water, each limb in the tree crowns
Riding their own eddy, each person striding
Their own path, a window opening and a cat
Threading between parked cars, the sky
Pulling it all along into what might happen
Next, and you arriving, saying, Come with me.
 

Table of Contents

I Love You More than All the Windows in New York City 3

My Eden Story 5

Aubade 7

Ode to a Serrated Knife 8

April in the First 10

Days 10 How Bad Is It? 12

Country Mice, during the Order to Separate Families, 2018 13

Food Truck Manifesto 15

I Had Just Hung Up from Talking to You 16

My Lovely Garonne 17

The Storm-Struck Tree 18

Elegy for a Tree 19

Green Permanent 20

For a Traveler 21

Day after Memorial Day 22

On Good Fortune 23

Calling 24

Twenty-Two Years Later 25

Missing You 26

Ode to a Potato Masher 27

When You First Met Me 29

Years Since We have Traveled 30

The First Time 31

As So Often Happens 32

Days I Delighted in Everything 34

Dawning 35

A History of Our Possessions 36

On the Bus Someday 37

Metaphor 39

Before the Internet 40

Aardvark 41

Porcupine 42

Ode to a Stovetop Espresso Maker 43

Florence Nightingale 45

Emily Dickinson's Herbarium at the Morgan Library 46

To Bill Zavatsky 47

I couldn't seem to take to the young people 48

Riga Aubade, May 49

A Nearly Perfect Morning 50

The Trees Having Tea above Me 51

Photo from the Half Year in Kobe 52

Everything Must Go 53

Route 684, Southbound Rest Stop 54

Just As, Just So 55

Letter to Jed from Niebla 56

NYC Mayor Bloomberg Bans Smoking Indoors, 2003 58

A Day Here 60

I Was Waiting for You outside the Post Office 61

Ode to Polish Forests 62

After All This Time 64

Sky inside Brooklyn 66

I Took Out the Part 67

Acknowledgments 69

Editorial Reviews

In Spilled and Gone, her new collection of poems, Jessica Greenbaum envisions a Brooklyn that is real and a Brooklyn that is everywhere. She achieves this by a brilliant use of metaphor: her seagulls ‘wheel like immigrating thoughts,’ and a half-moon at dawn is ‘stuck like a dime in the coin slot.’ So, too, her exuberant odes to a potato masher and a stovetop espresso maker raise those mundane objects until they rise off the page, Whatever she entertains — a storm-struck tree, an outdoor concert, her immigrant grandparents, a food truck in Grand Army Plaza — her subject is enlivened by keen observation, a fresh mind, and a vivid sense of place that makes me want to be there, with her, in her world.

Grace Schulman

Jessica's Greenbaum's poetry has the joie de vivre of New York School poetics, tempered by the griefs and reflectiveness of an experientially tested soul. Confident in craft, substantial of heart, Spilled and Gone is the dexterous voice of a poet calling out to her earthly company of people and things, claiming and praising them. When I read it, I feel myself open and relax into the world.

Tony Hoagland

In her stunning new collection Spilled and Gone, Jessica Greenbaum transcends the limits of ordinary experiences, making of them indelible moments of human boundedness. We feel ourselves breaking in each heartrending line here, as houses crash down next door and lupines are all we have left – and when it seems our very souls might leak away, we are ultimately repaired by the poet's abiding faith in life and love, like ‘the trees/themselves, how we depend on them to keep standing around us.’ Such is the astonishing healing power of Greenbaum's poetry, to admit freely our impermanence, and yet always to restore us.

Rafael Campo

Jessica's Greenbaum's poetry has the joie de vivre of New York School poetics, tempered by the griefs and reflectiveness of an experientially tested soul. Confident in craft, substantial of heart, Spilled and Gone is the dexterous voice of a poet calling out to her earthly company of people and things, claiming and praising them. When I read it, I feel myself open and relax into the world . . .  This is deeply satisfying work.”—Tony Hoagland
 


“In Spilled and Gone, her new collection of poems, Jessica Greenbaum envisions a Brooklyn that is real and a Brooklyn that is everywhere. She achieves this by a brilliant use of metaphor: her seagulls ‘wheel like immigrating thoughts,’ and a half-moon at dawn is ‘stuck like a dime in the coin slot.’ So, too, her exuberant odes to a potato masher and a stove-top espresso maker raise those mundane objects until they rise off the page, Whatever she entertains—a storm-struck tree, an outdoor concert, her immigrant grandparents, a food truck in Grand Army Plaza—her subject is enlivened by keen observation, a fresh mind, and a vivid sense of place that makes me want to be there, with her, in her world.” —Grace Schulman


“In her stunning new collection Spilled and Gone, Jessica Greenbaum transcends the limits of ordinary experiences, making of them indelible moments of human boundedness. We feel ourselves breaking in each heartrending line here, as houses crash down next door and lupines are all we have left - and when it seems our very souls might leak away, we are ultimately repaired by the poet's abiding faith in life and love, like ‘the trees/themselves, how we depend on them to keep standing around us.’ Such is the astonishing healing power of Greenbaum's poetry, to admit freely our impermanence, and yet always to restore us.” —Rafael Campo
 

From the Publisher