The Occupant: Poetry (Pitt Poetry Series) - Softcover

Maier, Jennifer

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822967391 ISBN 13: 9780822967392

Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2025

Synopsis

<i>The Occupant </i>is a collection of persona and prose poems that explores the “inner lives” of common household objects, along with that of “The Occupant” of the house, their human keeper. Taken together, their shifting perspectives engage questions of time, mortality, and the nature of consciousness itself, reminding readers of the beauty and strangeness that lurk under the surface of ordinary thought—the “other world” that, as Paul Éluard noted, “resides in this one.”

About this title

About the Author

<b>Jennifer Maier</b> is the author of <i>Now, Now</i> and <i>Dark Alphabet</i>, which was named one of Ten Remarkable Books of 2006 by the Academy of American Poets and was shortlisted for the 2008 Poets’ Prize. Her poems have appeared in <i>Poetry</i>, <i>Plume</i>, <i>Southern Humanities Review</i>, <i>Scientific American</i>, <i>The Gettysburg Review</i>, <i>American Poet</i>, and elsewhere. She works as a professor of modern literature and poetics, writer in residence, and senior faculty in poetry in the MFA program at Seattle Pacific University.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

<b>Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.</b><br><b>Excerpt from The Occupant: Poetry by Jennifer Maier</b><br><br>THE OCCUPANT IMAGINES THE HOUSE AS A GREAT FISH<br><br>It has already swallowed a century, each year a silver iridescent scale.<br>For eight, she has lived in its belly, slightly beyond her means. How well<br>she knows its creaks and currents of air, its slow, digestive rhythms.<br>How many mornings she has stood behind the large, glassy eyes that<br>stare impassively down on the park, observing the junkies and dog<br>walkers awash in airy sunlight; and how many evenings felt herself<br>sinking incrementally into the still and liquid night.<br><br>Sometimes she imagines the former occupants: the long dead whose<br>bones are coral, or the others—dense spirits skimming the surface in<br>narrow boats. She’d like to ask them a few things. <i>Why did you wallpaper</i><br><i>the ceiling? Do you grieve for your body? </i>But their words, dissolved in air,<br>can find no purchase here, and she is not yet proficient in the dialects<br>of silence.<br><br>Still, there is no ill will. They come, untenable shadows, and go, stirring<br>the boughs of tall firs. Today too the sun appears, birds call across the<br>surface of the morning. <i>Song of dissolution, song of light. </i>She turns from<br>the window as the thought rises—<i>the house is a fish, and I</i>—then glides<br>into shadow, softly as the back door opening, closing.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0822967391
• ISBN 13: 9780822967392
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 80