Children with Enemies
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- $21.99
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- $21.99
Publisher Description
There is a gentleness in the midst of savagery in Stuart Dischell’s fifth full-length collection of poetry. These poems are ever aware of the momentary grace of the present and the fleeting histories that precede the instants of time. Part elegist, part fabulist, part absurdist, Dischell writes at the edges of imagination, memory, and experience. By turns outwardly social and inwardly reflective, comic and remorseful, the beautifully crafted poems of Children with Enemies transfigure dread with a reluctant wisdom and come alive to the confusions and implications of what it means to be human.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Dischell (Backwards Days, Dig Safe) elevates ordinary moments in these poems of deep attention and patient detail. Amid a world full of worries, there are cows in a field reminding us that they are "Asleep all night on our hooves,/ Our fears are common, our sounds monotonous." There's a strawberry at the perfect moment of ripeness, "shaped like a big toe, plucked/ in California who-knows-when," waiting to be enjoyed. And Dischell writes of receiving a glance from a potential admirer that "strummed once across the strands of my DNA." The speakers in these poems admit to being watchers, as in a revelation about passing the same stranger every morning, noticing that "She owns several coats, all of them/ The same length." The poems often feel suspended in time, moving between memory, history, and present moment: a young man leaves the Bronx to fight in the Spanish Civil War, dying in the Pyrenees; remembering the moment he left, his former lover turns "her face in the direction she thought was Spain." Earnest without being cloying, Dischell writes as if he's thumbing through a photo album, wishing to fill in the missing details just outside each frame.
