The True Keeps Calm Biding Its Story

by Rusty Morrison

Poetry. Winner of the 2008 James Laughlin Award. In the aftermath of her father's death, the speaker of Rusty Morrison's exquisitely formed poems takes a step-by-step accounting of her transformation... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0916272982
• ISBN13: 9780916272982
• Release Date: January 2008
• Publisher: Ahsahta Press
• Length: 88 Pages
• Weight: 0.35 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Stop Listen Please Advise Peace

This book is one poem long with nine (9) sections and all the end-lines of the 72-page poem contain the word "stop" or "please" or the phrase "please advise." In this poem, you will find Lyn Hejinian autobiographical sentences such as "my father's dying offered an indelicate washing of my perceptions stop" In this poem, you will find John Ashbery flourishes, such as "breadcrumbs were really the ones swallowings birds stop" In this poem, you will find Gertrude Stein cadences, such as "I recite reasons as if they were saints' names stop" or "can a memory ever admit it no longer recognizes itself please" In this poem, you will find the quotidien as well as the holy, celebrated surrealistically and minimalistically, such as "turned on the heater then off again then on please" and "soon will I be able to discern the linen texture of right silences stop" or "a skirtful of fresh pears rolling onto the lawn and into the stealth of narrative please" Nicholas Kazantzakis wrote in one of his novels about St. Francis that madness is the salt that keeps common sense from rotting. In this poem there is a lot of madness and little common sense, but all of it is of the kind that leads to quiet reflection on sense-making and nun-like contemplative retreat from the noisy mechanical world of loud-mouthed commonness. When the world is too much with you, read this quiet and sensitive book as one would sip alkaline water or eat unleavened wafers, please. Stop. Please advise.