Full Description
Between the Crackups is a frolicking romp through the abandoned factories, overcrowded highways, and forgotten rural landscapes of America. This provocatively voiced book explores themes of sexuality, gender, class, pop-culture, and aesthetics. Some of these poems are sonnets, some are multi-voiced elegies, others are meditations on loss. From the balmy swamps of Florida, to the snowed-in forests of northern Wisconsin, and back again, Rebecca Lehmann captures a feeling of cultural unease and personal panic in tight, smartly worded poems that banter casually with the tropes, traditions, and authors of the Western poetic canon. In the book, the Old English poem "The Dream of the Rood" is re-imagined as a two-part, modern-day fever dream, the classic pastoral landscape morphs into an apple orchard occupied by off-putting children, and the entire season of autumn goes missing. Part serious meditation and part carnival fun house, these poems will make the reader chortle, chuckle, snort, and maybe even blush.
Contents
Between the Crackups
I. The Devil Is In Detroit
A Hundred Words For Loser
Letters To A Shithead Friend
Bucolic Calling
The Youngest Girls In Memphis
To Feed And Water Ourselves And Others
The End Of The World
Muster Lovely
Pterodactyl Eye Chart
My Father's Fourth Tooth
The Factory, An Elegy In Six Parts
1. The Managers
2. Call And Response
3. Managerial Meeting
4. Randall's Lament
5. A Trial Is A Way To Find Guilt
6. Memo To All Workers
The Devil Is In Detroit
II. Think Georgia, Gorgeous
My Mister's Eyes
A Dream Of The Rood
A Dream Of The Rood
Think Georgia, Gorgeous
Ten Bells Tell
The New Town
Front Yard Regatta
Let's Go To The Party
One Morning I Wake Up
Lands End
Something Very Woman
1/()()=0
North Florida Rain
Look At The Tree
III. The Poem Is The Story
A Gun In The First Act
Someone Has Sent A Letter
Year, Years A-Sparkle
Under Vision Walls
Dear Cousin
Particulate Matter
The History Of Yesterday
For Posterity
Has Anyone Seen Autumn?
The Poem Is The Story (1)
The Poem Is The Story (2)
The Poem Is The Story (3)
The Poem Is The Story (4)
The Poem Is The Story (5)
Pasture
