Bitters - Softcover

Seiferle, Rebecca

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1556591683 ISBN 13: 9781556591686

Publisher: Copper Canyon Press, 2001

Synopsis

Bitters is an extended quarrel with God, driven by the desire to recover what is banished to the marginal and apocryphal. In her third collection Seiferle claims whatever originates in the earth as an emissary of the divine, whether it is a starving boy in a supermarket or the maggots thriving in the skin of a cat.

Seraphim

Even houseflies must have their angels.
Principalities, at knee or elbow, the voice
of God caught within an ear, at such a pitch,
it makes the skull hum. And if I swat them,
can they blame me? Like all good messengers,
they're just testing whether we are still alive.
By such means, the priest taught me, "God creates.
All the living and the dead, just a nursery
for his hatching." So when I found a trinity
of maggots in the abdominal wall
of a living kitten, though I had to pinch
them out, I could not blame them—Shadrach,
Meshach, Abednego, pale witnesses
of a homesick God, caught in the furnace
of the flesh, hoping to sprout wings.

Against the background and harsh light of the desert Southwest or withing the darkness of European history and religion, Seiferle has created a new kind of beauty: tragic, wise, open to every possibility. And just as the liquor of the title are colorful, earthy draughts of distilled spirits with an ancient medicinal history, so too are they a fitting metaphor for these darkly humorous and curative poems.

Rebecca Seiferle's The Music We Dance To was nominated for the Pulitzer prize and poems from the volume are included in The Best American Poetry 2000. Her first book, The Ripped-Out Seam won the Bogin Memorial, the Writers' Exchange, and the Writers' Union Poetry Prize. Her translation of Cesar Vallejo's Trilce won the 1992 PenWest Translation Award. She lives in Farmington, NM.

About this title

About the Author:

Rebecca Seiferle is the author of four books of poems and two volumes of translations of Cesar Vallejo. She is Lannan Fellow, editor of the online magazine The Drunken Boat, and recently taught at Brown University. She lives in Tucson, Arizona.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Seraphim

Even houseflies must have their angels.
Principalities, at knee or elbow, the voice
of God caught within an ear, at such a pitch,
it makes the skull hum. And if I swat them,
can they blame me? Like all good messengers,
they're just testing whether we are still alive.
By such means, the priest taught me, God creates-
all the living and the dead, just a nursery
for his hatching. So when I found a trinity
of maggots in the abdominal wall
of a living kitten, though I had to pinch
them out, I could not blame them--Shadrach,
Meshach, Abednego, pale witnesses
of a homesick God, caught in the furnace
of the flesh, hoping to sprout wings.

Proviso

Pyrus Malus- an evil fire?-burning
in the branches, perhaps, of a primitive
species of crab-apple, cultivated
in all temperate zones into so many
varieties: the apple of discord
awarded to the fairest (in beauty
not justice) who caused the burning of Troy,
the apple of Sodom that Josephus

claimed dissolved into smoke and ashes
when grasped by a traveler's hand,
Adam's apple, the apple of love,
the apple of the eye, the Apple John
said to be perfect only when shriveled,
any number of erroneous fruits, any
disappointing thing. "Faith (as you say)
there's small choice in rotten apples" or
"Feed an enemy the skin of a peach,
a friend the skin of an apple." But tree
of knowledge or morning snack, you can have
the gala skin, the blush of the apple,
even the white succulent flesh, if you save
me the core-that earthly constellation
usually tossed to horses or thrown away.
I'll be with the gypsies who cut to the star
of seeds at the heart of each orb, for
it's the core I want-intensely apple,
medicinal with a dash of arsenic, the zing
of earth, the crisp bite of becoming.

About this edition

• Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 1556591683
• ISBN 13: 9781556591686
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 158