Full Description
From Kingsley Tufts Award finalist Kathy Fagan comes Bad Hobby, a perceptive collection focused on memory, class, and might-have-beens.
In a working-class family that considers sensitivity a "fatal diagnosis," how does a child grow up to be a poet? What happens when a body "meant to bend & breed" opts not to, then finds itself performing the labor of care regardless? Why do we think our "common griefs" so singular? Bad Hobby is a hard-earned meditation on questions like these—a dreamscape speckled with swans, ghosts, and weather updates.
Fagan writes with a kind of practical empathy, lamenting pain and brutality while knowing, also, their inevitability. A dementing father, a squirrel limp in the talons of a hawk, a "child who won't ever get born": with age, Fagan posits, the impact of ordeals like these changes. Loss becomes instructive. Solitude becomes a shared experience. "You think your one life precious—"
And Bad Hobby thinks—hard. About lineage, about caregiving. About time. It paces "inside its head, gazing skyward for a noun or phrase to / shatter the glass of our locked cars & save us." And it does want to save us, or at least lift us, even in the face of immense bleakness, or loneliness, or the body changing, failing. "Don't worry, baby," Fagan tells us, the sparrow at her window. "We're okay."
Contents
1
Dedicated
Forest
Stray
Animal Prudence
Cooper's Hawk
Farm Evening in the
Blue Smoke
At the Champion Avenue
Low-Income Senior & Child Care Services Center
AccuWeather: Real Feel
Keelson
Dahlia
Foreshortening
Cognition
My Father
Bad Hobby
2
Empire
Fountain
The Rule of Three
Helvetica
Omphalos
The Ghost on the
Handle
Predator Satiation
AccuWeather: Episodes of Sunshine
The Supreme Farewell
of Handkerchiefs
Birds Are Public
Animals of Capitalism
Personal Item
The Children
"Where I Am Going"/"I
Dare to Live"
Topless
Mint
Morning
3
Latecomer
What Kind of Fool Am I
Conqueror
School
AccuWeather: Windy, with Clouds Breaking
Window
Trace
Wisdom
Aftermath
My Mother
Ohio Spring Jingo
Snow Moon & the
Dementia Unit
Scarlet Experiment
Lucky Star
Inactive Fault, with
Echoes
Notes
Acknowledgments
