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Devotions

ebook

In the hands of Bruce Smith, devotions are momentary stops to listen to the motor of history. They are meditations and provocations. They are messages received from the chatter of the street and from transmissions as distant as Memphis and al-Mansur. Bulletins and interruptions come from brutal elsewheres and from the interior where music puts electrodes on the body to take an EKG. These poems visit high schools, laundromats, motels, films, and dreams in order to measure the American hunger and thirst. They are interested in the things we profess to hold most dear as well as what's unspoken and unbidden. While we're driving, while riding a bus, while receiving a call, while passing through an X-ray machine, the personal is intersected—sometimes violently, sometimes tenderly—with the hum and buzz of the culture. The culture, whether New York or Tuscaloosa, Seattle or Philadelphia, past or present, carries the burden of race and "someone's idea of beauty." The poems fluctuate between the two poles of "lullaby and homicide" before taking a vow to remain on earth, to look right and left, to wait and to witness.


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Series: Phoenix Poets Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Awards:

Kindle Book

  • Release date: April 15, 2011

OverDrive Read

  • ISBN: 9780226764368
  • Release date: April 15, 2011

PDF ebook

  • ISBN: 9780226764368
  • File size: 371 KB
  • Release date: April 15, 2011

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Formats

Kindle Book
OverDrive Read
PDF ebook
Kindle restrictions

subjects

Fiction Poetry

Languages

English

In the hands of Bruce Smith, devotions are momentary stops to listen to the motor of history. They are meditations and provocations. They are messages received from the chatter of the street and from transmissions as distant as Memphis and al-Mansur. Bulletins and interruptions come from brutal elsewheres and from the interior where music puts electrodes on the body to take an EKG. These poems visit high schools, laundromats, motels, films, and dreams in order to measure the American hunger and thirst. They are interested in the things we profess to hold most dear as well as what's unspoken and unbidden. While we're driving, while riding a bus, while receiving a call, while passing through an X-ray machine, the personal is intersected—sometimes violently, sometimes tenderly—with the hum and buzz of the culture. The culture, whether New York or Tuscaloosa, Seattle or Philadelphia, past or present, carries the burden of race and "someone's idea of beauty." The poems fluctuate between the two poles of "lullaby and homicide" before taking a vow to remain on earth, to look right and left, to wait and to witness.


Expand title description text