Quite apart
By: Krystal Languell
Edition: First edition.
Series: Akron series in poetry; Akron series in poetry
Publisher: The University of Akron Press
Published: 2019
Place of publication: Akron, Ohio
Language: eng
Number of pages: 90
ISBN-13: 9781629221427; 9781629221434; 9781629221441
Copyright date: 2019
Subjects: American poetry
Work titles: Poems
Description: "Quite Apart asks 'what about after survival?' in a chronicle of attempts to have a heart in a rough world. Haunted by work and its wasted hours, the book offers a glimpse of self-rendered as subtext beneath the sheen of productivity. Inventive formal poems provide a kind of alibi, mirroring the inflexibility of the environment--driving through mountains, bleeding in alleys, losing keys in a bar parking lot--to allow some emotion to pass through, tenderness intact. The action among forms of address moves across the sections from direct to readerly, to more distant, back to the last/lost sequence, and ultimately into an intimate direct address, which builds up a reserve of trust adequate to collapse the distance of a cool operator. Mediated by grammatical invention, the collection enacts the making of an authentic place and self, reckoning with difficult truths (failures, omissions) to arrive at a state of peace having weathered some storms. It returns to a core and singular perspective, a knowing eye, that captures absurdity and tragedy, the absurdity of tragedy, to find--beyond vigilance--a balance between acceptance and bucking, which is perhaps another name for love"--