Childcare
-
- $12.99
-
- $12.99
Publisher Description
Crackling with the hypervigilance of parenthood, Childcare explores the paradox at the root of raising kids: the joy of new life accompanies an awareness of potential loss. Rob Schlegel’s fourth collection observes the tangled emotions of fatherhood; even as he wonders at the strange intelligence of youth, he elegizes the present moment. The longitudinal wisdom of this collection appears in the choreography of its leaps — how it moves from the aside “[My son] needs my love the most when he least deserves it / Is something I read” to the reflection that “Death / Names my shape. I keep my clothes / From dust and ghosts and time. / I’m angry at my father for aging.” From Schlegel’s relentless curiosity and keen observations, the artistic crisis driving the book emerges: does poetry memorialize the ephemeral moment, saving something for us, or does it remove us from experience? The duality of language’s role — that it, ultimately, has the capacity to do both — doubles the significance of “childcare” in this collection, which comes to represent not just the work of child rearing but the dutiful care by adult children for their parents. Perhaps nothing can convey the scope and quality of family life like the concatenated dependencies of “(Un)conditional,” which terminate here: “If the cut draws blood / If life ends in desire // If it begins in love.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"I have no place to put everything/ my children make me feel," Schlegel announces in his ruminative fourth collection (after In the Tree Where the Double Sex Sleeps). Yet he captures as much as he can with quiet, urgent desperation that gives these poems a flickering liveliness. Writing amidst the chaos of working, child-rearing, and house-sitting, Schlegel is haunted by "the lowercase tragedy/ life is," blending dreamscapes with the day-to-day. He anticipates future disaster while attempting to absorb a current one: "I stress-eat chips in the kitchen/ Listening to Audie Cornish/ Narrate Kavanaugh, which is totally abstract/ Till my son asks me about it." Later, as if to remind himself, he lifts a line from Clarice Lispector: "Here I should record a joy." "Creeping Thyme" sprawls with moments of deep, strange tenderness made fierce by temporality. In one section of the poem, he imagines near-tragedies—a breech baby, a child drowning—remarking instead, "my children are merely sleeping/ And I can't separate their beauty/ From the future violence they will commit,/ Nor from the violence to be committed against them." These skillful poems are full of affective feeling and thinking.
