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Biographical note: Rebecca Lehmann lives with her husband in Wisconsin, USA. Her poems have been published in Tin House, The Iowa Review, The Gettysburg Review, Best New Poets 2010, and other journals and magazines.
BIC Basic
EAN13: 9781844718580
ISBN: 9781844718580
Author: Rebecca Lehmann
Title: Between the Crackups
Series: Salt Modern Poets
Product class: BC
Language: eng
Audience: General/trade
BIC subject category: DCF
Publisher: Salt Publishing
Pub date: 15-Nov-11
Extent: 80pp
Height: 216 mm
Width: 140 mm
Thickness: 5 mm
Weight: 120 gms
Supplier: Gardners Books
Supplier: Ingram Book Group
Supplier: Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability: NP
Price: GBP 9.99
Price: USD 15.95
Rights: World
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Short
description/annotation: Between the Crackups is a frolicking romp through the abandoned factories, overcrowded highways, and forgotten rural landscapes of America. Part serious meditation and part carnival fun house, these poems will make the reader chortle, chuckle, snort, and maybe even blush.
Main 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.
Table of 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 View excerpt as PDF:  Click here to view a sample ( KB)
Excerpt from book:
Ten Bells Tell
Visions of lovebirds and prickled pears,
an inability to spell or tell
time, a heightened sense of hearing,
as in to hear the little tweets
upon the grates.
Had they but singsong
equal to their greeting.
To hear ten bells tells
we are falling, the bruise
on the leg like an angered owl.
The fingers peeling back,
weird human tricks, in the palm
a scar the shape of a supernova.
A pocketknife cut through.
Inability to hold one’s head up.
To hear ten bells tells
we are not dying after all.
We may believe we are.
One’s hands like jackrabbits
ready to hop and bite
the nipples of one’s lover.
One’s head in silhouette.
In the maelstrom. And all the birds.
To hear the tin cups.
The ten-tin-cupping-nation
of the bells, bells, bells.
Not signaling apocalypse.
To scar the face. An inability
to hold one’s head at bay.
On the offensive, the pungent
smell of body in a southern summer.
The odor like rotting cacti
and cat piss. The weather a crash.
The face in place. To cut
the hands. To pull the skin
back, spit in the wound.
Inability to bifurcate during times
of stress and resolute paranoia.
Inability to stay within one’s shoes.
Cover up the face with a scarf
like winter. The stink. Inability,
the hard-song. The coming together.
Unpublished endorsement: Rebecca Lehmann is an advance scout in the war between the heart and the intellect. The heart wants peace, but the mind wants to blow us all to kingdom come, because we are working in factories, we are lost in Detroit and Memphis, we are driving South. What can save us? she seems to be asking. Not God with his wafers and hymns. Not sex with its tricky ambushes. Not anger that is setting the world on fire. Maybe it’s love, she says, or maybe words with their euphoric brew. Or maybe not. Barbara Hamby, author of All-Night Lingo Tango, Lester Higata's 20th Century, and other books. |
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