Full Description
John Hennessy's Exit Garden State never strays far from family life as it ranges from childhood in New Jersey's industrial corridor to mid-life in the woods of New England, from Rahway prison's sullen grey dome, Newark's steel flyway, to Lisbon's labyrinths and miradouros, from the smooth volcanic peaks of the Cyclades to his dead in Dublin. Keenly mindful of their ancestors and the immigrations that have brought them here, the speakers of these poems, their various personae, explore the knots of familial experience, what it's like to be both parent and child simultaneously, to be embraced by family as well as to lose it, to celebrate kinship and endure its sorrows and changes. Hennessy remains rooted in the propulsive energy of his lines, the clarity of his craft, while traversing emotional territory as broad as the book's geography.
Contents
One / Oil Tank Farm
Family Man in the Valley
Middle School and Son
Oil Tank Farm
Family Story / So What Dad?
No Clock in the Forest
Convenience Store Aquinas
Back Home
Open Season, 2016
Leaving the Garden
Two / Domestic Retrograde
Tutor to the Prophet
Netflix Green Man
Leading with My Wedding Ring
Crane Elegy
Miguel Hernandez Green
Silvano
Panic Through the Refineries
Dad Cried a Lot
More Sky Please
In Another Life
Three / Second-Chance Dad
Second-Chance Dad
Pay Packet Saturday
Lenten
Contagion! / Divorcing Dad
Cerberus vs. Freddy
Whiskey Green Man
Living the Dream
Who Will Save, Now You're Grown
My Father's Rooms
Connecticut River Report
Most Embarrassing Stories
Four / Domestic Direct
Domestic Retrograde
Spontaneous Midnight Makeover Party
Late to Saint Pat's / Domestic Direct
Sifnos Travelogue
Idios
Lisbon / Transient Global Amnesia
Lucid Even in Your Fury
I'd Be the Fish
Bitterness
After Greece
Some Future Tense
Which God Were You?
I) Which God Were You?
II) Closer to God
III) Twenty Questions
After Alexandria
