
The Lesser Fields
"Rob Schlegel has a mind of winter. Like the painter Morandi, Schlegel makes a world of absence and deprivation-our world, the world of human mortality-feel like plenitude. Imagine wanting to discover the place where you yourself 'have not yet happened.' Now imagine creating this place in a language of hard-won precision-a diction and syntax so elegantly austere that the smallest gesture becomes an explosion of possibility. The result is a book that feels rivetingly contemporary while resembling nothing else, a book that seems shockingly intimate while giving nothing away. The Lesser Fields is a guide-book to the world we've always known but never truly seen." —James Longenbach, final judge “In The Lesser Fields, Rob Schlegel takes a lit match to the surfaces of his words in an act of poetic arson. Thus the poet wanders a landscape whose commonplace markers-fish, sea, trees, birds-are made disquietingly strange: ‘Before my mind / Can shape it, presence / Finishes a thought in my fingers.’ The natural world of language manifests with an incendiary beauty at once tender and dangerous, reckless and precise. This poetry burns subtly, but the heat is unmistakable.�—Elizabeth Robinson
41 Chapters |
Format | Buy | Remix | |
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Economy of Winter |
ePub | |||
Sun peels paint from one side of the vacant house A sudden wind disquiets the chimes from its empty pockets; its heavy branches |
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Ontogeny |
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Here and not here, I breathe away Would that they return as fish surface film or epithelium; body I fold and rainstem—a water unending having shattered into many pieces is a length of horizon by which I measure |
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With Shut Eyes What My Mind Sees Does Not Belong to Me |
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In the city whose streets I knew I ate melons in a dusty kitchen until each hook became a leaf When birds lit on the front lawn The voices of my depressed and handsome neighbors Me and not me and the two halves I lost some people and made a few mistakes. Each day, I tried to give myself and you will surely lack direction. Near the freeway entrance Above him, tiny birds |
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Icicles Tine Barnward from the Barn’s Shallow Eave |
ePub | |||
Barbwire fence extending field to thicket That I should climb each tree before I torch it. Tongue and bone If this is lament, drown it behind the dam The fence through which wind blows snow enough against the knife’s tip, I slip its pale skin as I dress the bird its feathers scatter. |
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I Pack Her Suitcase with Sticks, Light the Tinder, and Shut the Lid |
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She used to sit on the forest-floor Tonight, her name is a leaf covering from the dress she wore into the grave |
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Illuminated Face |
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From the sidewalks I collect the feathers of birds What colors best stain the white beards of men As a man, I am free and listening. |
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Near the Creek Emptied of Water |
ePub | |||
Dry-lightning and a thunder made a sock and its thread a bird found that disturbed the silence—by its feet and a tally of stains in the curtains. |
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Dusk by Flame |
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The sudden insects and a shirt tossed onto the pond. Faceless, the moths trouble nothing but the flame. Isn’t it all— The barn on fire and the wool of the shirt are trances. |
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Allies |
ePub | |||
Until someone steals my coat I polish their black shoes At night I sleep and my siblings but the dark glass only reveals so they think If they could change their names |
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Lovemaking in America |
ePub | |||
I watch a silent film about the sea and I am forced Upstairs, you fill the bath with everything that has You think you have lived this day before. Earlier But the magician was only a magician Somewhere in the future, we are remembering this day |
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Secrets Objects Share |
ePub | |||
Fear is a glass float adrift in the harbor To keep from weeping The sea: is it copper or a month of tides Guardian, give me safe direction. I am just a boy weighed down with fear. Do I sail, or place bluebells |
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Economy of Winter |
ePub | |||
They might have been olives or grapes where the paper is wavy as the tree from which the paper was fashioned though never enough—when the sun was low Some might say it is the image of a house. |
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People Live Here |
ePub | |||
Alone, she sleeps in this room. Thirty years We hunt ghosts seeping out On Division Street, her boy Jerry died She walks that route with Louise sometimes. She insists it is bad luck Bad luck to go to sleep stormy. The windows are open the morning People gathered here after Jerry died |
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The Lesser Fields |
ePub | |||
Are you a branch in the hand of the unwell? Are you walking in the field? Is there a book? Have you touched the stone? Do you know the flowers? Are you asleep? I am salt sorrowing the lesser fields. |
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The Snow Uncut Is a Field of Orphans |
ePub | |||
Whose gardens are shielded with ice Broken only |
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She Drops Each Suture from Her Stomach into the Vase on Her Bedside Table |
ePub | |||
Varnished black She tucked beneath a blanket |
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A Boy Is Kicking the Stomach of a Dog |
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Whose teeth remain private Whose fate grows heavy this hour |
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From a Sheet of Yellow Paper I Cut Bolts of Lightning |
ePub | |||
To scatter over the birds Some dead All of them prepared |
Details
- Title
- The Lesser Fields
- Authors
- Rob Schlegel
- Isbn
- 9781885635136
- Publisher
- The Center for Literary Publishing
- Imprint
- Price
- 12.95
- Street date
- April 04, 2016
- Format name
- ePub
- Encrypted
- No
- Sku
- B000000080209
- Isbn
- 9781885635136
- File size
- 1.79 MB
- Printing
- Allowed
- Copying
- Allowed
- Read aloud
- Allowed
- Format name
- ePub
- Encrypted
- No
- Printing
- Allowed
- Copying
- Allowed
- Read aloud
- Allowed
- Sku
- In metadata
- Isbn
- In metadata
- File size
- In metadata