Last Call: Poems on Alcoholism, Addiction, & Deliv

Gorham, Sarah [Editor]; Skinner, Jeffrey [Editor];

ISBN 10: 0964115182 / ISBN 13: 9780964115187

Published by Sarabande Books, 1997

About this Item

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Bibliographic Details

• Title: Last Call: Poems on Alcoholism, Addiction, & Deliv
• Publisher: Sarabande Books
• Publication Date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0964115182
• ISBN 13: 9780964115187
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: New
• Weight: 10 ounces

About this title

Synopsis

Sarah Gorham is the author of two collections of poetry, Don't Go Back to Sleep (Galileo Press, 1989) and The Tension Zone (FourWay Books, 1996). Her work has appeared widely in such places as The Nation, Antaeus, Poetry, The Kenyon Review, Grand Street, The Missouri Review, The Georgia Review, The Southern Review, and Poetry Northwest, where in 1990 she won the Carolyn Kizer Award. She has received grants from the Kentucky State Arts Council, the Kentucky Foundation for Women, the Delaware State Arts Council, and the Connecticut Commission on the Arts, She is Editor-in-Chief and President of Sarabande Books, Inc.

Jeffrey Skinner has published three collections of poetry, Late Stars (Weslyan University Press, 1985), A Guide to Forgetting (Graywolf Press, 1988) and The Company of Heaven (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992). His work has appeared in numerous literary magazines including The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The Nation, The Georgia Review, and Poetry. He has been awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the Howard Foundation, and several state arts councils. He is also a playwright, and two of his plays were finalists in the Eugene O'Neil Theater Conference competition. He is currently Director of Creative Writing and Professor of English at the University of Louisville.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Poem from this anthology:

Good-bye

You are saying good-bye to your last drink. There is no lover like her: bourbon, big gem in your palm and steep fiery blade in your throat, deadeye down. None like her but her sister, first gin, like your first seaswim, first woman whose brine took to your tongue, who could change the seasons of your cells like nothing else. Unless it was wine, finally your only companion, winking across the table, hinting in her rubies, her first-class labels, of her peasant blood and the coarse way she would open you.

Good-bye, beauties. You don't want to say it. You try to remember the night you fell out of the car and crawled to the curb, the night two of you stood screaming over your daughter's crib. You remember deaths by gin, by easy capsules- the friend who fell in silence and the friend who quoted Antony in his suicide note. All this helps for a moment, till your heart blooms and stiffens with desire.

- Joan Larkin