A Night in Brooklyn
Poems
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
D. Nurkse’s deeply satisfying new collection is a haunted love letter to the far corners of his hometown, Brooklyn, New York, and a meditation on the selves that were left behind in those indelible places.
Here Nurkse brings alive the particular details that shape a life, in this case unique to the world of Brooklyn—a job at the Arnold Grill, “topping off drafts with a paddle” for the truckers who came in; the deaf white alley cat that mysteriously survived the winter on a stoop in Bensonhurst; the narrow bed where young love took place; the wild gardens behind the tenements. His exploration of this almost mythic city past is combined with a sense of the future speeding toward us—the ongoing riddle of time and being in a larger universe.
. . . And she who was driving said,
We know the coming disaster intimately but the present is unknowable.
Which disaster, I wondered, sexual or geological? But I was shy:
her beauty was like a language she didn’t speak and had never heard.
From “The Present”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Desire creates reality in the latest from Nurkse: "We wanted so much that there be a world/ as we lay naked on our gray-striped mattress," the book begins. Throughout its three sections "each act a past and a future/ an almost and absolute," and those who act and desire are vulnerable, haunted by time's forward motion. The Brooklyn of the opening title section is at once literal borough and a living context where, "Though we are fading/ all our actions last forever." Here, even the dead can remember Brooklyn a deceased father can still frequent the haunt where his son tends bar while the living always return "to slip the key in the lock,/ and come back to the present," where lovers fight next door. From far-reaching outskirts of this all-encompassing Brooklyn, new voices enter in the second section, "Elsewhere," including Andalusian fragments and riddles from Spanish and French. Lastly, "No Time," further records and questions what's fleeting: "If this is happiness,/ how shall we leave it,/ if this is grief, how to enter it." Nurkse recalls: "How we loved to create a world," and he renders our imperfect world perfectly in this stunning book.
