Nostalgia for a world where we can live : poems / by Monica Berlin.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Berlin, Monica, 1973- author.

Series:

Crab Orchard award series in poetry.

Crab Orchard series in poetry

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American poetry.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (x, 74 pages).

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Carbondale : Crab Orchard Review & Southern Illinois University Press, [2018]

Summary:

Monica Berlin's Nostalgia for a World Where We Can Live resides at the turbulent confluence of relentless news cycles and the repeated rending of our interior lives.In Berlin's poetry sorrow makes its own landscape--solitary, intimate, forward-looking.

Contents:

Cover Page

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Contents

Nostalgia for a World Where We Can Live

What a year looks like: drenched. So soggy here. So much

No apples on the apple tree this summer, and if there were

Another late summer early quiet blue-skied morning, my son

On either end of this year, on either end of every goddamn year,

When we turn the calendar's page, my little boy looking

The dark flurry of another morning purred

This afternoon the sky's making the kind of promises it can

Days the hours are no more fact than the unbelievable

Sometimes being here is like

To scale, yes, days to scale, even when they grow so cluttered

Just before the blood draw the other morning, I filled in small

We loved the rush hour most, the cars suit-filled, briefcase-heavy,

Today, three flights up, with my whole body, I lifted

Some disasters are given names, others called after

The truth is I have trouble forgiving most things, although I've never minded

By rote the body learns nearly everything, after

It's true. There are places we'd rather be

Not quite another season, but almost, and on the window ledges,

How I wish more things I read I misread, like the bodies in the mine

Because you're still in another time zone disparate things

The problem is the revolving door, this

Because I wasn't thinking peninsula

If there's a joke more complicated than "knock-knock," more

Too lazy to lip-read in noisy rooms, the other night

A kind of stutter, that over and

Down the hall the accordion man turns into a door

Long before the horse pulls up lame there is the matter

Back to this wind, up against it even,

The linens soften, now threadbare, just as I'm waking, small, in this

When morning was almost unrecognizable as morning.

What the wind kicks up, what the waters trouble, even

The forecast's calling for flurries tomorrow, and worry

At the new year, in the dark, I watched time

The lesson tonight nothing less than

In this, this snow-brightened light of a near-spring morning, I think of his glass

How quickly the body, when asked, forgets

Stay mouthed through

How quiet every end when it comes, briefest glimpse of a future

If all the love we'll know is the kind of love

Because all day the sky held back

Not only the night

Notes

Acknowledgments

Back Cover.

Notes:

Description based on print version record.

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

0-8093-3684-7

OCLC:

1066742281