Mean / Colette LaBouff Atkinson.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Atkinson, Colette LaBouff.

Series:

Phoenix poets.

Phoenix poets

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Prose poems, American.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (62 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2008.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

In the appropriately titled Mean, Colette LaBouff Atkinson's speakers confront a series of cruel lovers, estranged ex-husbands and ex-ex-wives, neglectful parents, disrespectful children, menacing drunks, would-be rapists, well-meaning but ineffectual teachers, and that annoying kid in first grade who wouldn't leave you alone. Managing to "say" what most of us would only think but never dare speak out loud, this stunning debut collection reveals that the horrors and cruelty we experience in everyday life can turn out to be very real indeed. But Atkinson does not merely rake her subjects across the coals: she deftly exposes, instead, how the world mirrors back to us our own meanness, lending it a truth and a history. In forty-three deadpan, often merciless prose poems that are masterpieces of the form, Mean lays bare the darkness within the narrator's heart as well as in ours. "Colette Labouff Atkinson's artful laconicism attains the force of a shout, without ever raising its voice. The intelligent, merciless narrative cool arrays a sad comedy, with an unemphatic but penetrating 'and then . . . and then': accounts of love pursued far more often than it is glimpsed or realized."-Robert Pinsky

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Acknowledgments

Space Race

Mean

Mean, Part Two

Medium Intense Red Copper

Rocket

Loose

Heat Wave

Hart Crane Slept Here

Four

London (1987)

Wrecking

Three Days of the Condor

The Glass Show Lounge

Bakasana

Deal

"I'm sorry I was blind"

Hover

Intention (The Dead Leaves)

Gain

Spring Fling

New World

Laurel

Replacement Monkey

Spirit

Proximity

Juju's Sister

Gun Dog

Flower Girl

Park Bench

"Perhaps this verse would please you better-Sue-(2)"

Prosthetic

Garden Variety

"For God's sake, get out"

Route

1652

Graphic Novel Romance (V for Vendetta)

Ghost Squad

Hips

1971

Port of Los Angeles

"Taking it like a little soldier, aren't you?"

Fortune-Telling

Gardena Freeway, California

Notes

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

ISBN:

1-282-53767-9

9786612537677

0-226-03060-1

OCLC:

593274211