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POEM OF THE WEEK #1
Sarah Manguso
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"O my America! my new-found-land!" exclaimed
John Donne before his lover's body. In her book
The Captain Lands in Paradise
(Alice James Books, 2002),
Sarah Manguso becomes the Columbus enthralled by a seductive and terrible new
world where, "when the boy throws the girl in the snowdrift, the shape she leaves in the snow looks nothing like her."
Born in 1974, Manguso picked up her educational creds at Harvard and Iowa and has now taken up residence as a Hodder
Fellow at Princeton University. Her poems have appeared in
The Pushcart Prize anthology,
The Best American Poetry series,
and such journals as The American Poetry Review,
Boston Review, The New Republic, and
The Paris Review. With
Jordan Davis she is editing the forthcoming
anthology Free Radicals: American Poets Before Their First Books (Subpress).
Her poem for KultureFlash is from the just-completed manuscript, Siste Viator. |
Address to an Absent Lover
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The boy speaks in Russian (I understand him neither in the dream nor in real life). He opens his eyes and
looks at me, apologizing in English for keeping them closed.
When I wake up I think he must have seen me. But when I kiss him he looks surprised, as if he were blind.
The night I met you I wrote It is possible I have imagined my entire life.
*
My great-grandmother's lamp is mine now. It is made of rose quartz -- that is, it is made of poetry.
More poetry: A coin you dropped when you took your pants off is still on the floor. Please come back and pick it up.
More: The scar on my hand I got cleaning the house for you has outlasted you. In this way you are indelible, but
only as long as I have my hand.
POEM ARCHIVE
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© 2004 KultureFlash
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