The Nightlife

by Elise Paschen

Overview

In Elise Paschen’s prize-winning poetry collection, Infidelities, Richard Wilbur wrote that the poems “. . . draw upon a dream life which can deeply tincture the waking world.” In her third poetry book, The Nightlife, Paschen once again taps into dream states, creating a narrative which balances between the lived and the imagined life. Probing the tension between “The Elevated” and the “Falls,” she explores troubled love and relationships, the danger of accident and emotional volatility. At the heart of the book is a dream triptych which retells the same encounter from different perspectives, the drama between the narrative described and the sexual tension created there.

The Nightlife demonstrates Paschen’s versatility and formal mastery as she experiments with forms such as the pantoum, the villanelle and the tritina, as well as concrete poems and poems in free verse. Throughout this poetry collection, she interweaves lyric and narrative threads, creating a contrapuntal story-line. The book begins with a dive into deep water and ends with an opening into sky.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781597090278
Publisher:	Red Hen Press
Publication date:	05/11/2017
Pages:	80
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Elise Paschen is the author of three poetry collections: Infidelities (Story Line), winner of the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize; Houses: Coasts (Sycamore Press, Oxford); and, most recently, Bestiary (Red Hen Press). She is editor of Poetry Speaks to Children and co-editor of Poetry Speaks Expanded (Sourcebooks) and Poetry in Motion (Norton), among other anthologies. She is a member of the Osage Nation and former Executive Director of the Poetry Society of America. Paschen teaches in the Writing Program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Read an Excerpt

The Wide Stars Above Our Sky

Class was called The Wide Stars Above Our Sky.
Charles and I enrolled while Shira planned her summer abroad helping those in need.
Across the kitchen table she unfurled a map, flattening it down with her palm,
then pointed to a small country near Russia.

Shira said, “Let’s check out that hot Peruvian-
Asian restaurant downtown.” I declined,
deciding to eat dinner with my parents instead.
Chai, the puppy, was eight weeks old. I plowed through snow to purchase a knee joint at Kriser’s so she would stop chewing the chairs and table.

Shira didn’t think she’d meet the right man in the tiny country adjoining Russia.
My graduate-school poetry professor offered the workshop every twenty minutes.
Black ice slicked down back alleys, intersections.
Monuments of snow barricaded sidewalks.

Charles transformed into my college boyfriend.
As we climbed into the blue Subaru
I forgot to explain that I already was married. We drove miles until we reached the summer college. My professor turned into a high-school friend, now TV host, who ambled

around the corner of the red brick building,
counting the cumulus clouds overhead.
He wore only a blue terry-cloth bathrobe.
I asked, “Will The Wide Stars Above Our Sky
begin on time?” The clock said four p.m.
That was when Shira’s plane took flight.

Editorial Reviews

The Nightlife is not only a beautiful and inventive collection, it’s an important contribution to this period in American poetry. Paschen's voice shows us how—given all the choices in form, voice, subject, and vision—a poet might make the art her own through the force of her personal brilliance, and a generous and idiosyncratic sensibility. In this work it is as if ‘. . . she unhinged every / window . . .’ These are poems you return to not only for the music and the detail—equally powerful through her wide-angle lens as under her magnifying glass—but to puzzle out how she managed it. So much craft in work that reads so freely, seems to have issued forth so effortlessly, but also from some supernatural source, poems that read as if the poet were ‘. . . trying to put back / the wild fury she had released.’ This is poetry that reminds us of all the power and possibilities of poetry itself.”—Laura Kasischke, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Space, in Chains

“Scrupulously crafted and deeply affecting, the poems in Elise Paschen’s The Nightlife investigate certain varieties of persistence right at the root of what it means to be human: the persistence of reality into dream, of dream into waking life, of the dead among the living, and of the living through time, precarity, and loss. The sturdiness of Paschen’s sentence structure, her almost architectural sense of musicality, and a gorgeous, Neo-Imagist attentiveness to sensory detail (‘Cattails flat against dirt: an impression of deer’) often belie, but just barely, the huge sorrow and uncertainty that haunt the work, functioning the way the banister and reliably regular dimensions of steps on a darkened stairway do—leading us, in the end, to ‘a surprise of light.’ The Nightlife is the most profound and consummate book yet from one of today’s most formally astute poets, and one for whom to give lasting shape to experience feels not only like part of the meaning of what she makes, but much of the motive to make it in the first place.”—Timothy Donnelly, winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award for The Cloud Corporation

“These poems are finely crafted boxes that are only opened at night when the family is asleep. They are hidden under the bed. One contains dreams that were lost then found. Within another are the oceans of all summers past. . . . This collection, which is graced by the moon and stars, is Paschen’s best. As she says in a haiku: 'I entered the room / of this life to discover / time had come to move.' And we are here, being moved.”—Joy Harjo, winner of the Academy of American Poets’ Wallace Stevens Award and author of How We Became Human

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