No Longer at This Address: Poems (Pitt Poetry Series) - Softcover

Hemmert, Andrew

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822967537 ISBN 13: 9780822967538

Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2025

Synopsis

No Longer at This Address explores place and the psychology of leaving through the inflammatory lens of the American West. The collection uses the lyric-narrative mode to complicate notions of rootedness and address the ephemerality of where one’s from. The poems visit bison ranches in the Rocky Mountains, converse with a collapsed satellite, and find complicated joy among wildfire ash and lost dogs. No Longer at This Address is a catalog of various departures and arrivals and ultimately paints a portrait of one man’s attempt to make a new home with his loved ones in a volatile and uncertain future.

About this title

About the Author

Andrew Hemmert is the author of Blessing the Exoskeleton (University of Pittsburgh Press) and Sawgrass Sky (Texas Review Press). His poems have appeared in various magazines including The Cincinnati Review, Copper Nickel, The Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, and The Southern Review. He currently lives in Thornton, Colorado.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

EXCERPT from No Longer at this Address by Andrew Hemmert
Pgs.64-66
POEM: EPHEMERA

What is human in us, I suspect,
will never die. This, perhaps,
means everything else will.

All the grasses with my favorite names
are invasive, all the state birds
are leaving their appointed offices

for more fitting climates, and rats,
as always, are ubiquitous as night.
So what if I am afraid?

I remember, eighteen years old,
seeing a grey horse lying on its side
in a pasture by the intersection

of two interstates, not being
able to tell in the split second of driving by
whether its great chest was moving, and believing,

truly believing for a moment, that horse’s life
was all that mattered in the world.
Not the transplanted storm-hungry grass

that held it, not the stiff and twisted thorns
of the fence that bisected my witness,
not where I was going or how long

it would take me to get there.
And whether there was a single laurel oak,
whether weeds in its shade,

whether that tree’s branches were ever climbed
by anyone other than caterpillar, kudzu,
and the rain, good lord, on its way

down to the aquifer’s scaffold
of sinkholes? It didn’t matter.
And I know now the horse, also, didn’t matter

to the post office in its slow disappearance,
didn’t matter to the greenhouse gases,
didn’t matter to the wars

that will outlast us. But you,
of all people, must understand me.
You with your heart made of tax returns,
church chimes, and grey horses.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0822967537
• ISBN 13: 9780822967538
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 96