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Overview
"Poems of balanced wildness and instinctual grace."—New York Journal of Books
“[Twichell’s poems] open out into a stark, sometimes bewildered clarity.” —The Washington Post
“Suppose you had Sappho’s passion, the intelligence and perspicacity of Curie, and Dickinson’s sweet wit . . . then you would have the poems of Chase Twichell.” —Hayden Carruth
“A major voice in contemporary poetry.” —Publishers Weekly
Chase Twichell’s eighth collection lifts up the joy of the moment while mourning a changing world. In Things as It Is—purposefully not things as they are—the present and past parallel and intermingle. Meditating on a litany of formative moments, Twichell’s clear-as-a-bell voice delivers visceral and emotionally resonant lyrics, elegies, and confessions.
From “What the Trees Said”:
The trees have begun to undress.
Soon snow will come to bandage the whole wounded world.
When I was young I eloped with the sky. I wore blue-black, with under-lit ribbons of pink . . .
Chase Twichell, a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Twichell has published seven previous poetry collections, including Horses Where Answers Should Have Been, which received the 2011 Kingsley Tufts Award. For ten years, she owned and operated Ausable Press.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781556595493 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Copper Canyon Press |
| Publication date: | 10/09/2018 |
| Pages: | 144 |
| Sales rank: | 643,474 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.60(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Things as It Is Last night my hand began writing in the hand of some future me, as if a branch in wind had scribbled on freshly-fallen snow. In the dark, coyotes called back and forth in the bird-silence. I put down the pen and went outside, stood listening to wind in snow’s translation. Wild dogs, teach me a few of your words before I die. Strangers’ Houses The greenhouse door was kept locked, but kids knew about the key. Inside were aisles of orchids. It was like being inside a cloud. Can that be real? That I played in strangers’ houses when they were out, and no one ever knew? The same people had a water garden, with a lion-face fountain and small gold koi with lace tails. Can they live under the ice? No, Stupid, said a boy. They get new ones every spring. The Hill Towns of Connecticut Dust motes fell from the rafters all the way down into hay spiced with manure, molasses in the feed, and always a man, a stable hand or somebody’s friend. Girls and horses in the hill towns of Connecticut— such freedom, unimaginable now. On old wood roads, bareback, still flat-chested, kid-muscles wedding the beasts’, we rode through overgrown pastures to the hole of shadow at the woods’ edge where the trail began— in spring a greening tunnel of leaves bunched in still-closed infant clusters, but the red buds of the maples already falling. Once we tracked woodsmoke to someone’s secret camp. The wife was bent over the hood. They had a fire going, down to coals. The husband met my eyes. He looked sad. He looked away. I almost forgot about that. That, and the man who appeared in a dust-beam to a daydreaming girl with a curry comb, and slow-danced her up against the horse, holding her hand against him beneath his hand, saying How, oh how does it feel? Just say out loud how it feels and I’ll stop. Downstairs in Dreams Trying to fall asleep, I count down stone steps into the dark, and there they are: Centaurs, half in and half out of the woods, hindquarters still trees. Downstairs in dreams I look directly into their man-eyes, which are opaque, absorbent. They don’t speak. I don’t speak of the long yellow teeth tearing off the little dress—just for a glimpse, no harm done. No hands, no harm. Their hindquarters still trees. No words to explain or contain it. You can’t translate something that was never in a language in the first place. The Ends of the World When planes bound for Europe take off late at night flying due west, their sound comes to me as wind in deep winter, slanting the snow in the empty woods, forming bright scars, ridges of drift. Then I wake in the tropics’ air-conditioned chill. Dream wind, where has it gone? The sound of falling air, the ticking sleet, snow-diamonds scattered on the roads, picked out by headlights . . . When some grief overtakes me, my mind flees north to the clear-crashing brooks, sun and shucked-off ice, seeds splitting in the compost. It was real. I lived there when any moving water was safe to drink. Look, here come some jet-skis, gunning up to the public boat launch. In this world, the mango sky silhouettes the glass and steel aspirations of our kind, then weakens over the towers, the derricks and cargo ships. Just look at the guttering back of the bay, and all that flees from it— grand wound festering—what a sunset! Even the mango’s abandoning the sky, hitching a final ride on the clouds’ undersides. At first I raged at a single soda bottle aloft on a see-through wave. Raged and raged. Now I no longer want to see the illusion of the ocean intact, the not-blue not-green water breaking open and closing again, restless above its heart of garbage, the frothing white sucking edge depositing a toothbrush, flipflop, bald head of a doll, and the usual deflated jellyfish of condoms, cigarette filters still intact after who knows how long at sea, a vast and senseless migration— inedible, immortal, everywhere. Part of me wants to see the city gone entirely dark, glittering tableaux extinguished, nothing but ruins, colorless permanent shadows inhabiting the empty streets. How hard I fall out of sleep, out of a vision of the earth restored. I open my eyes in the dark, and find myself back in the Garden of Earthly Delights, naked again among stingers and fangs, extinct and future creatures, all of us unnamed and equal under the only sky. But art can’t resurrect it. It only dreams it. It hands a drunk an empty bottle. The Background Snow hushes the secret rooms of the woods, where in summer ferns in the under-gloom unfurl their slow green feathers. The sky glitters with garbage and cargo. I read the Evening News of the War, about the death of everything. That’s all there is—the sound of snow in the inner ear, sound with nowhere else to go. The background.
Table of Contents
The Ghost of Tom
Strangers' Houses 5
The Missing Weekly Readers 6
Maverick 8
Spiral 9
Snapshot with Eyes Turned Away 10
A Red-Hot X 11
The Children's Prison 12
Burning Leaves 13
The Hill Towns of Connecticut 14
Downstairs in Dreams 16
The Cloisters 17
The Ghost of Tom 18
Soft Leather Reins 20
Lederhosen 21
Radio Silence 23
Dark Slides 24
Private Ceremony 26
First Boyfriend 27
My Bob Dylan 28
Early Winter Wilderness 29
Sad Song 30
Graveyard of Imaginary Selves 32
Earth Without Humans
Before the Ash 37
Cloud Seeding 38
The Ends of the World 40
Booby-Trapped Weapons 43
The Background 44
After Snow 45
Crickets at the End of the World 46
A Strange Little Animal 47
Earth Without Humans 49
The New Dark Ages 50
Tiny White Spirals 51
Herds of Humans 53
Birdsong 54
Keene Valley Elegy 55
What the Trees Said 57
Always Elsewhere
A Pond in Japan 61
Mora's Party 62
The Portors 63
In One Ear 65
The Uphill River 66
Mom's Playthings 67
The Lullabies of Elsewhere 68
No Blue Allowed 69
Bermuda Sand 70
Mom Looking Skinny 71
Mom's Red Convertible 73
Babylon at Stonehenge 74
The Floatisphere 77
Movies of Mountains 78
Handwriting's Ancestors 79
The Words of His Dementia 80
Ermine Tails 81
Animals, Not Initials 83
The M Sound 84
Her Ashes 85
Roadkill
You, Reader, as I Imagine You 89
Cages for Unknown Animals 90
Nothing 91
Roadkill 92
Invisible Fence 93
Spaciousness 94
Zazen 95
Never 96
The Second Arrow 97
Silence vs. Music 99
Labradorite 100
Sickness and Medicine 101
Path of Red Leaves 102
Early Snow 103
Days of Not-Knowing 104
I Keep Scaring Myself 105
Falling Leaves 106
Nan's Stick 107
Fox Bones 108
Two Dogs Passing Through the Yard 109
Now's Dream
The Park from Above 113
The Feeder of Strays 114
Bipolar II-ity 115
The Duck Boat 116
Buzzyboy 118
A River in Egypt 120
Ghost Dress 121
The Phantoms for Which Clothes Are Designed 122
Murder and Mayhem in Miami 123
The Wrong House 125
Fireworks or Gunfire? 126
Ancient Questions 128
Now's Dreamt 129
What's Wrong with Me 130
Toygers 131
Plain American 132
Things as It Is 134
Kensho of Ash 135
Winter Crows 137
Fast Stars 138
Notes 141
About the Author 143