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A country of strangers : new and selected poems / D. Nurkse.

PS3564.U76 C68 2022

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Format:: Book
Author/Creator:: Nurkse, D., 1949- author.
Contributor:: Rosengarten Family Fund.
Language:: English
Genre:: Poetry.
Physical Description:: xiii, 286 pages ; 25 cm
Edition:: First edition.
Place of Publication:: New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2022.
Summary:: "The selected poems of an essential American poet, who has cast a clear eye on our politics, our places, and our heart's hidden stories over eleven books and thirty-five years. D. Nurkse's immigrant parents met on a boat out of Europe in 1940; he was a child of the generation whose anxieties were forged in the shadow of Hiroshima and the aftermath of WWII. His poems extend that child's dignified ignorance into an open encounter with the cataclysms of the latter twentieth century and with family structures. Whispers of the old country of Estonia provide the backdrop for the boy's baseballs, thrown in the fading twilight of the 1950s ("Secretly, I was proudest of my skill / at standing alone in the darkness"). The young man explores sexual passion and the arrival of a child in a young marriage ("We showed her daylight in our cupped hands"), while the mature poet writes of loneliness and community in our cities ("but on the streets / there was no one"), and the urgent need for us to keep expressing our will as citizens. Throughout this matchless career, Nurkse has crafted visceral lines that celebrate the fragility of what simply exists--birdsong, moonrise, illness, water towers--and the complexity of human perception, our stumble forward through it toward understanding"-- Provided by publisher.
Contents:: Machine generated contents note: A Country of Strangers: New Poems; Order to Disperse; The Detentions; In the City of Statues; In the Winter of Painted Swastikas; The Polls; The Screen; Marbles and a Dead Bee; Caligula; The White Prisons; Conversation Behind the White Curtain; The Arrow Creek Fire; Showers; The Commands; The Body; Marriage in the Mountains; Ischia; Early Morning, Late Summer, Unmade Bed; Money; This Life; Game with a Mad Bounce; Flora of the Boreal Forest; Evening in the Pines; A Clearing on Ruth Island; The Unendurable Tests; The Fire; A Lullaby; The Chime; A Country of Strangers; Not Yet America; Staggered Lights; Small Countries; Grandmother's Exile; The Settlement; Time; Starting Again in the Orchard Country; The Windfall Mountains; Order; Paradise; The Engagement in the Plains; Repairs; Barrier Islands; Walking on the Highway; Lamps and Fences; Shadow Wars; The Physical; Spring Formal; Resistance; The Roof of the Handbag Factory; A Vagrant; G.E. Nonviolent Action; The Turn; The Unborn; The Second Stroke; The Visitors; The Ancient War; Indian Summer; Ten Seconds; Isolation in Action; The Old Country; Tartu 1939; Privates; The Demotion; The Siege in the Forest; In the Winter Capital; Voices over Water; Saaremaa; Factions; Slow Summer; The Marriage to War; The Occupation; The Hidden Fighters; Expulsion; The New World; Alberta; No Harvest; A Year of Hunger; The Market Holds; The Shy One; The Last Preparation; Surviving Partner; Cold Brahms; Mistakes; Extinction; Arrival in the City; Inventing Nations; Leaving Xaia; The Car Bomb; These Are Your Rights; A Pause at Delta Assembly; A Block North of Mercy; The Last Husband; Final Settlement; The Swiftness with Which Those Cities Fell; The Guards; A Night in Toluna; The United States Embassy in Salvador; The Background Chords Return in Minor; The Checkpoints; The Rules of Paradise; Olmos; Childhood and the Great Cities; Childhood and the Last War; The Book of Loneliness; The Next World; My Father at Prades; We Believed in the End of the World; Scattering the March; The Portrait; The Birth Room; Only Child; Rendezvous in Providence; First Grade Homework; The Last Border; The Bond; The Fall; Initials; Left Field; The Hellmann's Jar; Under the Porch; At the Stage of Riddles; An Opening in the Largest City; The Stone House at Black River; A Couple in Garden City; Custody Wars; The Tower Overlooking the City; The Book of Splendor; At Mary Magdalene; Back Wards; At Holy Name; How We Are Made Light; Side Effects of Colirium; A Night at Mount Sinai; The Parasite; Leaving Mary Magdalene; Burnt Island; Ruth; The Reunification Center; Searchers; A Walk in Giovanna's Park; Home; A Hike to Little Falls; The Marriage in Canaan; Space Marriage; Origins of Desire; Diaspore; Hymenoptera: The Ants; Six Red Spiders in the Elm at High Falls; Separation at Burnt Island; Brittle Star; The Granite Coast; The Border Kingdom; Ben Adan; In the Hold; Exile's Child; The Prize; The Anti-Death; Sacrifice; August Snow; Canaan; Lament for the Makers of Brooklyn; Rosal; The Shelter; Autopoiesis; Late Summer; Picnic by the Inland Sea; Parousia; After a Bombing; The Missing; A Child in Brooklyn; Love in the Last Days; The Grail; Assignations; The King's Chamber; The Horse; Everyone in This Story Speaks Except Me; The Living Spring; Ceol Sidhe; The Self; The Other World; The Dog; Her Decision; An Opening; Armorica; Queen of the Land of No Sleep; The Adventure of Tristan and Iseult; The King's Prison; A Night in Brooklyn; Waking in Greenpoint in Late August; Making Shelves; Red Antares in a Blue Mirror; The Dead Remember Brooklyn; The Bars; Sonny Stitt at the Blue Coronet; The North Side; Letter from Home; The Trapper Keeper; The Living Will; Freedom and Chance; The Present; Damariscotta; The Simulacra; Andalusian Capias & Song Fragments; Five Spanish Riddles; A Night in Caceres; There Is No Time, She Writes; The Power Point; Psalm to Be Read with Closed Eyes.
Notes:: "This is a Borzoi book." -- title page verso.; Includes index.
Local Notes:: Acquired for the Penn Libraries with assistance from the Rosengarten Family Fund.
Other Format:: Online version: Nurkse, D., 1949- Country of strangers.
ISBN:: 9780593321409; 0593321405
OCLC:: 1257312712

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A country of strangers : new and selected poems / D. Nurkse.

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