Rock That Is Not a Rabbit, The: Poems (Pitt Poetry Series) - Softcover

Marks, Corey

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822967154 ISBN 13: 9780822967156

Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2023

Synopsis

Finalist, 2024 The Writers League of Texas Award for Poetry | Finalist, 2024 The Burdine C. Johnson Award for Best Book of Poetry from the Texas Institute of Letters

Change arises as something both desired and mourned in poems that reckon with a world where perspectives blur, names drift “billowing, unattached,” and language yields a broken music. A statue of Lenin topples in a Georgian square only to be raised again in a Dallas backyard. Antlers sprout from Actaeon’s head, rendering him unrecognizable to the dogs he loves. Ungainly piano notes pour from a window and wake unexpected wonder in a lost walker. A forest grows inside a box that once held a father’s new pair of shoes. Skylab slips from its watchful orbit and careens toward Earth. A familiar chair once owned by a now absent family appears in a field of wild parsnips. Meditative and richly imaginative, these poems cast and recast the self and its relation to other selves, and to memory, history, power, and the natural world.

About this title

About the Author

Corey Marks is the author of Renunciation, a National Poetry Series selection, and The Radio Tree, winner of the Green Rose Prize. He’s received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Natalie Ornish Prize from the Texas Institute for Letters, and the Bernard F. Conners Prize from the Paris Review. A University Distinguished Teaching Professor at University of North Texas, he directs creative writing for the Department of English.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

THE ROCK THAT IS NOT A RABBITT

 

The rock that is not a rabbit suns itself  

in the field, its brown coat that isn’t fur  

furred with light. The rock that isn’t a rabbit   

would be warm to a palm but wouldn’t   

quicken or strain from touch. It doesn’t ache   

with hunger or pine with rabbit-lust,   

doesn’t breathe the world in, translating   

scent into some rabbit understanding.   

The world is beyond its understanding.   

And yet the rock that is not a rabbit will   

outlast the hawk banking above, the fox   

sloughing free of its den, the wheel nicking   

off the road to disturb the gravel berm,  

the mower coughing up the neighbor’s yard.  

Even so, its ears fold back against its body   

as if to make itself small, a secret,   

though when a breeze disorders the grass,  

the rock’s stillness appears like wild motion. 

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Publication date: 2023
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0822967154
• ISBN 13: 9780822967156
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 104