Muse (Crab Orchard Series in Poetry) - Softcover

Susan Aizenberg

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0809324431 ISBN 13: 9780809324439

Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press, 2002

Synopsis

Muse, the first full-length collection from poet Susan Aizenberg, brings together poems of personal history, elegy, and the complex lives of artists, writers, and “ordinary” people, in an exploration of the relationship between art and life, esthetics and ethics. She is sharp-eyed in purpose, trying to understand “what love is” in a continual shifting between loss and knowledge. While “there is no other world than this one” for Aizenberg, nevertheless she finds a world of affirmation. Aizenberg sings elegant blues, keeps a perfect balance between elaboration and restraint with formal skill that is both impressive and consoling, reminding us that poetry is a form of intelligence in which music creates a world full of mystery and depth.

About this title

About the Author

Susan Aizenberg is the coeditor (with Erin Belieu) of The Extraordinary Tide: New Poetry by American Women, a contributing editor to the Nebraska Review, and author of a chapbook-length collection of poems, Peru, which appears in Take Three: 2: AGNI New Poets Series. Her poems have appeared and are forthcoming in the Journal, AGNI, Chelsea, Prairie Schooner, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and many other publications. She is an assistant professor of English and creative writing at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Cortland, 1970

Always Monday, light October drizzle
misting our hair, wet-
wool musk of our peacoats.
Remember your father's library?
Three-for-a-buck novels,

all the rosy headlights
he could dream, group-gropes he couldn't.
Breakfast was beer in a jelly
glass. Then the ten-block walk,
hardscrabble shacks

imploding, to swing shift
at Smith Corona. I still have the scar
acid etched through my jeans
that first night. Peeling them down
in the ladies' room, I found a black

circle the size of a quarter.
In May we married between small claims
and traffic courts, my mother
sweating in cheap mink, the best man
sniffling, aching to get straight.

Twenty-Five Years from Anywhere Like That
Shoulder, hip, and heel, I sprint
faster in my wingless Nikes, circling the Boys Town
track as Bonnie Raitt's roadhouse wail
and slide guitar snake wire.

Cottonwoods blur like a hypnotist's
watch until the track disappears and I'm back
in the third row of the Fillmore East,
where Janis Joplin, too wasted

to sing, slugged honeyed mash
from a high-tipped bottle. We sang "Ball and Chain"
a cappella on the D train, grinding
high notes breaking the national anthem

as the subway rocked the sour dark,
red and blue lights strobing.
That year, we traded up to barefoot rides
in limousines, four-way sunshine

for breakfast: onion grass
looney-tuning into little green men.
Now teenage girls from Boys Town pass me
quick, a middle-aged woman
they can't imagine seventeen, running away,
that burnt-out place
on Rickard Street, a bare mattress under
the corona of shot gun holes

left there for the landlord
by a flute player who cared for no one
but sent his clear notes
up the fire escape anyway.

Edition details

• Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0809324431
• ISBN 13: 9780809324439
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 80