This is the second collection from a Brooklyn poet whose work many readers will know from the New Yorker. Jessica Greenbaum's narrative poems, in which objects and metaphor share highest honors, attempt revelation through close observation of the everyday. Written in "plain American that cats and dogs can read," as Marianne Moore phrased it, these contemporary lyrics bring forward the challenges of Wislawa Szymborska, the reportage of Yehuda Amichai, and the formal forays of Marilyn Hacker. The book asks at heart: how does life present itself to us, and how do we create value from our delights and losses? Riding on Kenneth Koch's instruction to "find one true feeling and hang on," The Two Yvonnes overtakes the present with candor, meditation, and the classic aspiration to shape lyric into a lasting force. Moving from 1960s Long Island, to 1980s Houston, to today's Brooklyn, the poems range in subject from the pages of the Talmud to a squirrel trapped in a kitchen. One tells the story of young lovers "warmed by the rays / Their pelvic bones sent over the horizon of their belts," while another describes the Bronx Zoo in winter, where the giraffes pad about "like nurses walking quietly / outside a sick room." Another poem defines the speaker via a "packing slip" of her parts--"brown eyes, brown hair, from hirsute tribes in Poland and Russia." The title poem, in which the speaker and friends stumble through a series of flawed memories about each other, unearths the human vulnerabilities that shape so much of the collection.
Greenbaum
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Weitere Infos & Material
Acknowledgments ix
Next Door 1
Promised Town 3
House Phone 5
Anthology 7
What We Read Then 9
The First, Youngest Men 11
Seven, Seven, Seventy-Seven 12
The Voice of Peace 14
Houston in the Early Eighties 15
Without Measure 17
Stowaway's Ascent 18
One Key 19
Packing Slip 21
A Line from Jimi Hendrix Comes to Mind 22
Early April 23
"This" and "That" 24
When My Daughter Got Sick 25
Beauty's Rearrangements 26
What For is For 28
Before 29
Cosmic Page 30
A Poem for S. 31
Little White Truck 32
Sonnets for the Autobiographical Urban Dweller 33
Baldo's 34
Perfume's Journey 35
Little "the" Rules the World 37
Gardens, Passover 38
Streaming Nancy 39
The Use of Metaphor 42
God 43
The Gold Standard 44
Marriage Made in Brooklyn 45
Gratitude's Anniversary 47
What to Expect 48
My Hands in Winter 49
Firefly 50
One Block from the Navy Yard 51
The Moment We Can't Stay 52
For You Today 53
No Ideas but in Things 54
The Two Yvonnes 56
Dedications 58
Greenbaum, Jessica
Jessica Greenbaum is the author of the award-winning poetry collection "Inventing Difficulty". Her poems and essays have appeared in the "New Yorker", the "Nation", "Poetry", "Southwest Review", and elsewhere. She is the poetry editor of "upstreet".
Jessica Greenbaum is the author of the award-winning poetry collection "Inventing Difficulty". Her poems and essays have appeared in the "New Yorker", the "Nation", "Poetry", "Southwest Review", and elsewhere. She is the poetry editor of "upstreet".
