Tethered to Stars
Poems
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- 75,00 kr
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- 75,00 kr
Publisher Description
A collection born of polyphony and the rhythms of our cosmos—intimate in its stakes, celestial in its dreams.
Tethered to Stars inhabits the deductive tongue of astronomy, the oracular throat of astrology, and the living language of loss and desire. With an analytical eye and a lyrical heart, Fady Joudah shifts deftly between the microscope, the telescope, and sometimes even the horoscope. His gaze lingers on the interior space of a lung, on a butterfly poised on a filament, on the moon temple atop Huayna Picchu, on a dismembered live oak. In each lingering, Joudah shares with readers the palimpsest of what makes us human: “We are other worms / for other silk roads.” The solemn, the humorous, the erotic, the transcendent—all of it, in Joudah’s poems, steeped in the lexicon of the natural world. “When I say honey,” says one lover, “I’m asking you whose pollen you contain.” “And when I say honey,” replies another, “you grip my sweetness / on your life, stigma and anthophile.”
Teeming with life but tinged with a sublime proximity to death, Tethered to Stars is a collection that flows “between nuance and essentialization,” from one of our most acclaimed poets.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"My mourning/ is an animal and my animal a constellation," writes Joudah (Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance) in his meditative fifth collection. Through his ever-exact images, Joudah lays bare the sadness that plagues and binds the earth—a tree is cut from the ground, lightning strikes a highway, an old neighbor finds herself living alone. This is a treatise on cosmic unity that does not shy away from grief, but that yearns for the immense, abstract sense of possibility, believing that "a heart remains a heart in its beyond." The reality of belonging to a nation and of global capital tethers humanity to the planet, but more often, mortality is the binding element. "Hospice is a dollar sign," he writes, "Pandemics are a long view." The clarity of Joudah's imagery is countered by a complex choral voice that feels at turns analytical and biblical in its rise and fall. Each poem seems to be spoken from various perspectives, the roving voices echoing and replacing one another in their observations until both the speaker and addressee dissolve. "You'll be everywhere," one poem closes. Joudah offers a nuanced vision of what connects man to the cosmos in this deeply searching book.
