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The Late Parade: Poems
“Fitzgerald’s voice is a new and welcome sound in the aviary of contemporary poetry.”—David Kirby, New York Times Book Review

Aswirl with waking dreams and phantom memories, The Late Parade is a triumph of poetic imagination. To write about one thing, you must first write about another. In Adam Fitzgerald's debut collection, readers discover forty-eight poems that yoke together tones playful and elegiac, nostalgic and absurd. Fitzgerald's shape-shifting inspirations "beckon us to join an urban promenade" (McLane) with a multiplicity of chimerical stops: from the unreal cities of Dubai to the former Soviet Union, from Nigerian spammers and the Virgin Mary to Dr. Johnson and Cat Power.

"The glory of this volume is the long title poem, which carries the primal vision of Hart Crane into a future that does not surrender the young poet’s love of the real," writes Harold Bloom. Mash-ups of litanies, monologues and odes, these poems spring from a modernist landscape filled with madcap slips of tongue, innuendo, archaisms and everyday slang. Though Fitzgerald's lines often hallucinate meanings that feel open-ended, they never ignore the traditional pleasures of poetic craft and memory, their music an ambient drone—part Technicolor, part nitrous oxide.

Even so, what glues these fantasies together is more than the charm of the maddeningly chameleon rhetoric. Fitzgerald's sonorous voice is unabashedly that of a love poet's: melancholic, baroque and visionary. The Late Parade is a testament to the powers of confusion, which may disguise our sense of loss but offer in return that eloquent tonic known as poetry. As Richard Howard writes, "When the new poet turns up the heat, he gives us just the necessary outrages which make us understand what we never knew we could say."

"1113068768"
The Late Parade: Poems
“Fitzgerald’s voice is a new and welcome sound in the aviary of contemporary poetry.”—David Kirby, New York Times Book Review

Aswirl with waking dreams and phantom memories, The Late Parade is a triumph of poetic imagination. To write about one thing, you must first write about another. In Adam Fitzgerald's debut collection, readers discover forty-eight poems that yoke together tones playful and elegiac, nostalgic and absurd. Fitzgerald's shape-shifting inspirations "beckon us to join an urban promenade" (McLane) with a multiplicity of chimerical stops: from the unreal cities of Dubai to the former Soviet Union, from Nigerian spammers and the Virgin Mary to Dr. Johnson and Cat Power.

"The glory of this volume is the long title poem, which carries the primal vision of Hart Crane into a future that does not surrender the young poet’s love of the real," writes Harold Bloom. Mash-ups of litanies, monologues and odes, these poems spring from a modernist landscape filled with madcap slips of tongue, innuendo, archaisms and everyday slang. Though Fitzgerald's lines often hallucinate meanings that feel open-ended, they never ignore the traditional pleasures of poetic craft and memory, their music an ambient drone—part Technicolor, part nitrous oxide.

Even so, what glues these fantasies together is more than the charm of the maddeningly chameleon rhetoric. Fitzgerald's sonorous voice is unabashedly that of a love poet's: melancholic, baroque and visionary. The Late Parade is a testament to the powers of confusion, which may disguise our sense of loss but offer in return that eloquent tonic known as poetry. As Richard Howard writes, "When the new poet turns up the heat, he gives us just the necessary outrages which make us understand what we never knew we could say."

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The Late Parade: Poems

The Late Parade: Poems

by Adam Fitzgerald
The Late Parade: Poems

The Late Parade: Poems

by Adam Fitzgerald

Overview

“Fitzgerald’s voice is a new and welcome sound in the aviary of contemporary poetry.”—David Kirby, New York Times Book Review

Aswirl with waking dreams and phantom memories, The Late Parade is a triumph of poetic imagination. To write about one thing, you must first write about another. In Adam Fitzgerald's debut collection, readers discover forty-eight poems that yoke together tones playful and elegiac, nostalgic and absurd. Fitzgerald's shape-shifting inspirations "beckon us to join an urban promenade" (McLane) with a multiplicity of chimerical stops: from the unreal cities of Dubai to the former Soviet Union, from Nigerian spammers and the Virgin Mary to Dr. Johnson and Cat Power.

"The glory of this volume is the long title poem, which carries the primal vision of Hart Crane into a future that does not surrender the young poet’s love of the real," writes Harold Bloom. Mash-ups of litanies, monologues and odes, these poems spring from a modernist landscape filled with madcap slips of tongue, innuendo, archaisms and everyday slang. Though Fitzgerald's lines often hallucinate meanings that feel open-ended, they never ignore the traditional pleasures of poetic craft and memory, their music an ambient drone—part Technicolor, part nitrous oxide.

Even so, what glues these fantasies together is more than the charm of the maddeningly chameleon rhetoric. Fitzgerald's sonorous voice is unabashedly that of a love poet's: melancholic, baroque and visionary. The Late Parade is a testament to the powers of confusion, which may disguise our sense of loss but offer in return that eloquent tonic known as poetry. As Richard Howard writes, "When the new poet turns up the heat, he gives us just the necessary outrages which make us understand what we never knew we could say."

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780871407948
Publisher: Liveright Publishing Corporation
Publication date: 08/04/2014
Edition description: Reprint
Pages: 128
Product dimensions: 5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Adam Fitzgerald is the author of The Late Parade and George Washington. New poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, Granta, Boston Review, the New York Review of Books, and elsewhere. Fitzgerald is contributing editor of Literary Hub, teaches at NYU, and directs The Home School. He lives in New York.

Table of Contents

Cathedral 15

Strange Cinema 16

Caravaggio in Naples 18

The Bride 23

The Relay Station 34

The Map 36

And the City 29

It'll Do 30

Diary of a Young Void 32

The War We're Fighting Now 33

In Woods We Studied 35

Vowels and Continents 36

Phattafacia Stupenda 38

Toy History 40

Soviet Pastoral 41

Sometime, Even Later 45

Samuel Taylor Coleridge 46

Rock 48

Two Worlds At Once 50

Ho'oponopono 53

Boulevard Raspail 55

Expert Comedy 56

Nigerian Spammer 57

Advertisements for the Disabled 60

Collection Agency 61

Eternal Farewells (I) 63

The High Priest 65

Mid-Harbor 66

Poem for Reverdy 69

Lady's Magazine 71

Eternal Farewells (II) 73

As Ourselves 75

Mountain Story 76

Poem for John Locke 78

The Dialogue 79

At Urubupunga Falls 81

To a Shepherd 82

Happentrance 84

Like So 85

In Loco Parentis 90

A Waltz in Jefferson Park 91

Lost Colony 92

The Argument 95

Syracuse Court Case 97

Once More, With Feeling 101

Please Excuse Our Appearance… 107

Proud Hand 109

The Late Parade 110

Notes 119

Acknowledgments 135

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Related Subjects

Poetry
American Poetry
21st Century American Poetry
Other American Poetry
American poetry->21st century
American poetry->Male authors
Poetry
American Poetry
21st Century American Poetry
Other American Poetry
American poetry->21st century
American poetry->Male authors

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