West portal / Benjamin Gucciardi.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Gucciardi, Benjamin, 1984- author.

Series:

Agha Shahid Ali prize in poetry.

Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

West Portal (San Francisco, Calif.)--Poetry.

West Portal (San Francisco, Calif.).

Genre:

Poetry.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (85 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Salt Lake City, Utah : The University of Utah Press, [2021]

Summary:

"West Portal is the name of the neighborhood in San Francisco, California, where poet Benjamin Gucciardi grew up. It is also one of the names of the Pillars of Heracles-the entryway to the afterworld. Drawing on William Carlos Williams's assertion that "the local is the only thing that is universal," West Portal investigates the Bay Area's urban and rural landscapes along with the memories and people that reside there. Interweaving the narrative of the death of the poet's sister with the environmental and socioeconomic realities of the current moment, the poems in West Portal illuminate the experience of loss, and the attempt to create meaning in the wake of devastation. Through poems that are prayerful, observant, elegiac, pained, dreamlike, philosophical, and compassionate, the book asks: What do we consider holy? What is virtue? What should any of us value about our relationship to place or our relationship with each other?"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Intro

Contents

Foreword by Gabrielle Calvocoressi

1.

Type Two

Advice for Pallbearers

King Tide

Prayer for the Instant City

I Ask My Sister's Ghost How Dying Is

Spill

The Hermitage at Laurel Dell

Halo for the Scorched Orchard

I Ask My Sister's Ghost How Her Days Are Now

Masa

2.

Rendering the Pose

3.

Hunting Chanterelles in the Oakland Hills

The Rungs

Futile, - the winds -

The Invisible Hand Knocks Twice

Lines for John Berryman on the Bus from Little Mogadishu

Salve Regina

The Arachnologist

The Last Bear in the Headlands

Sonora Desert Halo

I Ask My Sister's Ghost to Take Me with Her

4.

I Ask My Sister's Ghost to Play a Game of Cribbage

Little Accents

The Kaleidoscope

Braille in Sicily

Outside Tallahassee

Halo for Evacuees

Self-Portrait with Daughter

Chosen Landscape

The Nest

I Ask My Sister's Ghost to Write Her Own Elegy

Acknowledgments.

Notes:

Description based on print version record.

Other Format:

Print version: Gucciardi, Benjamin West Portal

ISBN:

9781647690410

OCLC:

1232014592