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| Children with Enemies
ISBN: 9780226498621
Platform/Publisher: Ebook Central / University of Chicago Press
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Limited; Download: 7 Days at a Time
Subjects: Literature;
Dischell (Backwards Days, Dig Safe) elevates ordinary moments in these poems of deep attention and patient detail. Amid a world full of worries, there are cows in a field reminding us that they are "Asleep all night on our hooves,/ Our fears are common, our sounds monotonous." There's a strawberry at the perfect moment of ripeness, "shaped like a big toe, plucked/ in California who-knows-when," waiting to be enjoyed. And Dischell writes of receiving a glance from a potential admirer that "strummed once across the strands of my DNA." The speakers in these poems admit to being watchers, as in a revelation about passing the same stranger every morning, noticing that "She owns several coats, all of them/ The same length." The poems often feel suspended in time, moving between memory, history, and present moment: a young man leaves the Bronx to fight in the Spanish Civil War, dying in the Pyrenees; remembering the moment he left, his former lover turns "her face in the direction she thought was Spain." Earnest without being cloying, Dischell writes as if he's thumbing through a photo album, wishing to fill in the missing details just outside each frame. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Stuart Dischell teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He is the author of Good Hope Road , Evenings & Avenues , Dig Safe , and Backwards Days . |
