Description
To Be Read in the Dark casts its strobe of radical vision on the dark crises of our common experience. Personal and prophetic, these compressed lyrics are capacious in meaning. Here is a penetrating appraisal of the underlying politics and philosophical disposition of our daily struggles, both formally relentless and epic in scope. These are poems you will want to read aloud, letting this language spotlight a navigable course into and through the dark.
About the Author
Excerpt
Both a poet and a fiction writer, Maxine is the author of three books of short stories and three novels. Her most recent books are the short story collection Some of Her Friends That Year and the poetry books The Turning, Among the Names, World, and Evolution of the Bridge: Selected Prose Poems. She also won the 2009 PEN Translation Award as co-translator of The Selected Works of Friedrich Hölderlin.
Endings
you take the thread
dear taster of endings
warp or woof
an amorous quest
involving the greening
of translated ground
you take the words
like any blamed object
make them excessive
like crow’s mimicry
you breathe in their weather
exhale a death
night’s airy gestures
are over-determined
valor is pale
you ask for a window
to open a reason
for feeding on light
like any dead thing
you want some comfort
in room’s sentenced story
verbless black corner
changing your essence
like cave’s allegory
