String / Matthew Thorburn.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Thorburn, Matthew, author.

Series:

Barataria poetry

Language:

English

Genre:

Poetry.

Physical Description:

73 pages ; 23 cm.

Place of Publication:

Baton Rouge : Louisiana State University Press, [2023]

Summary:

"A book-length sequence of poems, Matthew Thorburn's String tells the story of a teenage boy's experiences in a time of war and its aftermath. He loses his family and friends, his home and the life he knew, but survives to tell his story. Written in the boy's fractured, echoing voice-in lines that are frequently enjambed and use almost no punctuation-String embodies his trauma and confusion in a poetic sequence that is part lullaby, part nightmare, but always a music that is uniquely his. The string of the narrative loops forward and backward; it's tangled and knotted. At first the boy believes that if he holds tight to this string and keeps following it, he can reach its other end and find a sense of peace. Ultimately, though, he realizes the string is endless. It keeps circling back. But what else is left to hold onto? How else can he remember what life was like before the war, remember the loved ones he lost, make sense of how he alone survived? And so he keeps telling and retelling his story, shaping his experiences into "sentences re- // worked until / they break / the hurt they / make a song.""-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Machine generated contents note: 1. Once

The Musicians

Pipistrello

My Picture of Father

My Picture of Mother

A Little

Her Breath

Saltzman

They

A Damaged Animal

Respair

The River's Song

A Bath

The Magician

The Boot

Pale Stars

2. Which Way Now

Stories We Do Not Tell

To Tighten and to Tune

Shatterings

After His Stroke

After the Bomb

Wouldn't Hold

The Barn

Get Away Get Away

Once Our Garden

Couldn't Let Go

3. There's This String

4. Mother's Silver Teapot

Each Night We Wandered

Doctor Saltzman's Black Bag

The Fisherman

Disappear

Where She Went

What's Left to Tell

63 The Stag

Let Her

I Remember He Was Like a Dancer

Until You Never

A Girl Was Singing.

Other Format:

Online version: Thorburn, Matthew. String

ISBN:

9780807179048

0807179043

OCLC:

1344159137