Surface of the lit world
Subtitle: poems
By: Shane Seely
Series: Hollis Summers poetry prize
Publisher: Ohio University Press
Published: 2015
Place of publication: Athens, Ohio
Language: eng
ISBN-13: 9780821445129; 9780821421482
Subjects: POETRY; American poetry; General
Work titles: Poems
Description: "In The Surface of the Lit World, Shane Seely draws on a wide range of sources -- from personal memory to biblical narrative -- to explore the stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves, the ways in which we make meaning of our lives. Seely delves into the ways in which family and environment shape us. Poems ranging from terse, meditative lyrics to more direct narratives examine the relationship between what lies visible on the lit surface and what lies just beneath. In addition to first-person autobiographical narratives, there are ekphrastic poems; poems that explore narratives from mythology and religion; and poems based on news reports, radio stories, and audio recordings. Regardless of the approach, the central questions are the same: How do we sense the world we live in? What do the institutions to which we turn for meaning -- family, religion, art, literature, science -- offer us, and in what ways do they fail us? The answers may depend on where we dare to look"--
Table of contents: title: Acknowledgments; I; Descent; The Fledged Boy; Rehearsal for an Execution; View-Master; Danaë; Partial Solar Eclipse; Lost Ring; Chain Saw at Dusk; The Opossum; On the Recording of Weldon Kees Reading"Relating to Robinson"; These Fine Collapses; The Cinder Woman; Isaac's Lament; Sucker Fish; Early Postcard from Paradise; II; After Stanley Kunitz; You Fell Forward on Both Knees; Noon Bus in a Heat Wave; For the Swamp King of Kalispell; Sonnet for the Pennsylvania Mountain Lion; Dürer's Rhinoceros; Laisse for an Insect on an Open Book of Poems; Teaching English at the Chrysler Plant; title: Walt Whitman at the Irish Festival, Syracuse, New York: Four SnapshotsStick; Orpheus Charming the Animals; The Kite Flyers of Forest Park; Preschool Race, Seen through a Bus Window; III; Silm: Four Definitions from the Estonian; Gathering Wood before Rain; A Low Wall; Bat in the House; The Late Deluge; Spider Laisse; Anthology; Still Life with Mice; The Frozen Pond; The Stone Garden; The Weedy Thicket; The Orangutans of the Omaha Zoo; The Fox; Centralia; Forest Cemetery; Notes