God's breath hovering across the waters / Henry Israeli.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Israeli, Henry, 1967- author.

Contributor:

Laura Jan Meyerson Poetry Fund.

Standardized Title:

Poems. Selections

Language:

English

Genre:

Poetry.

Physical Description:

81 pages ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

New York, NY : Four Way Books, [2016]

Summary:

God's breath hovering across the waters begins with the story of Arthur Penzias's discovery of the echo of the big bang through a cryogenic microwave receiver and from there explodes into a meditation on the author's mother's untimely and tragic death. Memories, history, war, science, horror movies, space exploration, and the RCA dog are just some of the subjects that expand and contract, intersect and repel, throughout the arc of the collection. Praise for previous books: "Such lovely doubts in these poems....These rescues are almost always simply human--a couple making love, a child drawing--as the edge here, the dread, is so humanly complex. This is simultaneously a raw and restrained book. Israeli doesn't spew or explain but remains open to the need so consistently embodied in these poems." --Bob Hicok "Israeli is visceral and brilliant, intransigent in his doubts. His poems lead deeper into the wilderness--toward the human, the ambivalent, the paradox Dorothy Day called 'a hard and dreadful love.'' --D. Nurkse

Contents:

God's breath hovering over the waters (His Master's Voice) 3

30th Street Station 21

A Nebula 22

A Canticle with Dashes of Remorse 24

Braving the Elements 26

Dark Matter 27

The Mother's Song 29

The Sequel 33

Theory of the Big Bang 35

This Poem Will Not Die, So I Beat It Senseless 39

The Great Soviet Space Dog Experiment 41

What of the Flea 47

Depraved Cogitation 48

The Garden of Earthly Delights 50

Personal Jesus 52

Missing Children 54

A Bouquet of Knives 55

The Book of Fixed Stars 57

Braindead 59

Monuments 60

Mesopotamia, Mesopotamia or The War on Terror 62

The Harrowing Business of Loss 63

I've Never Seen My Mother Drunk 69

Swing 70

Theory of Evolution 73

Time and Space 81.

Local Notes:

Acquired for the Penn Libraries with assistance from the Laura Jan Meyerson Poetry Fund.

ISBN:

9781935536765

1935536761

OCLC:

944014182

Publisher Number:

99969103947