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Grotesque tenderness / Daniel Cowper.
- Format:
- Book
- Author/Creator:
- Cowper, Daniel, 1981- author.
- Series:
- Hugh MacLennan Poetry Series ; 48
- Language:
- English
- Subjects (All):
- American poetry.
- Physical Description:
- 1 online resource (145 pages)
- Place of Publication:
- Montreal, Quebec : McGill-Queen's University Press, 2019.
- Summary:
- Afraid to be alone / we met by lamplight, trading stories: // Sin of Man was one, // Age of Science, another. More // prayers than answers. Daniel Cowper's debut poetry collection, Grotesque Tenderness, speaks for an unrooted age, for unrooted people. In these poems, city-dwellers long to ally themselves with some sympathetic culture or the evolutionary logic of nature, but those alliances remain conditional, ambiguous, or dangerous. A tsunami smashes a harbour city into “tide-rows of burning debris”; children chase snakes in summer meadows. The primordial past spins off “rogue by-products and flawed replicas,” while lonely office workers get high on back porches and drink themselves to sleep. The musical and kinetic energy of Grotesque Tenderness is driven by our urge to understand pain and our hunger to reach an imperfect reconciliation with the problems of guilt and suffering. But in the tradition of William Blake, these poems affirm again and again that “the lit / world goes on living” and life justifies itself through its own workings. From elegant lyrics of alienation and heartbreak to long-form mythopoeia and lament, these poems approach beauty, ugliness, even criminality in a spirit of wonder and vulnerability.
- Contents:
- Front Matter
- Contents
- The Life & Crimes of Sextus Tarquinius
- Transubstantiation
- Phoresy
- Too Small to Eat
- Child's Play
- The Camera
- Fugitives Will Bring the News
- News
- Elect
- MacBeth
- Notes for the Sentencing
- Psychiatric Evaluation
- Failure to Appear
- The Fugitives
- Regrets
- The Lotus-Eaters
- Counterpoised
- Departures
- Ballgame
- Rat Patrol
- Red-Eye
- Spandrel for Pan Twardowski
- A Long Country
- Underground
- Wanting to Look
- Snake in the Mind
- Time Delay
- Walking
- Secret Water
- Vagrants
- Civil War
- Crowsnest Pass
- Home before Dark
- A Little History
- Age of Innocence
- Age of Experience
- Age of Exploration
- Age of Anxiety
- Age of Plagues
- A Land Flowing with Silk and Money
- Age of Prophecy
- Age of Empire
- Age of Science
- Windfishing
- 1400 Cromie Rd
- Euclid Refuted
- Labour Day
- Goodnight, September
- Weeknight
- Searle's Chinese Room Problem
- Vancouver Cherries
- Winter Construction
- Finisterre
- It Wouldn’t Be Spring
- Together Still
- Two Bodies Once
- Instead of a Christening
- Winter Oaks
- The Salt Worlds
- Cinematheque
- Abiogenesis
- Zugzwang
- Mercy
- Fire Worship
- Oncology of Ice
- Thirst
- Hunger
- Easter Sunday
- Principles of Conduct
- Earth on the Ocean's Back
- Note to Reader Regarding Sextus Tarquinius
- Acknowledgments
- Notes:
- Description based on print version record.
- ISBN:
- 9780773557710
- 0773557717
- 9780773557703
- 0773557709
- OCLC:
- 1083307748
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