In this Book
- You Are Here: Poems New & Old
- Book
- 2016
- Published by: University of Arkansas Press
Winnowed from a distinguished career, then distilled, then polished and winnowed again, the poems in You Are Here are Leon Stokesbury’s best from fifty years of published work.
The selections from his earlier volumes are as fully realized as one would expect from the winner of the AWP Poetry Competition and the Poets’ Prize. But it is in Stokesbury’s new work, collected under the heading “These Days,” that he reveals something completely different. From a carnival sideshow to Hitchcock’s Mount Rushmore, from John Keats’s backyard to the miseries of a failed crematorium operator, every turned page divulges a particular we didn’t see coming. You Are Here is like a sideshow of this modern world, even when we discover, amazed, our selves looking back at us.
“Why do we still only stand here?” Stokesbury asks in one of his earliest salvos. The poems in this collection give such varied answers that readers will have no idea what the next page holds, only that they will find themselves somewhere new.
Table of Contents
- Acknowledgments
- pp. xi-xii
- I. These Days
- pp. 3-4
- The Day Kennedy Died
- pp. 8-9
- Staple Song
- p. 17
- That Time of Year
- pp. 20-21
- Room with a View
- p. 27
- Colonel Kilgore’s Complaint
- pp. 29-30
- The Gold Rush
- p. 31
- You Are Here
- pp. 34-35
- Burnt Bridges
- p. 38
- Georgia Gothic
- pp. 43-46
- To a Nightingale
- pp. 47-50
- These Days
- pp. 51-52
- II. Autumn Rhythm (1996)
- pp. 55-56
- Evening’s End
- pp. 57-62
- The Garden Path
- p. 63
- The Royal Nonesuch
- pp. 64-66
- Bottom’s Dream
- pp. 67-69
- Reynaldo in Paris
- p. 70
- An Inkling
- pp. 72-78
- I Greet You
- p. 80
- Morte d’Arthur
- p. 81
- Kitty Litter
- p. 82
- Dark Blurb of the Soul
- pp. 85-86
- Señor Wences and the Man in the Box
- pp. 87-90
- III. The Drifting Away (1986)
- pp. 91-92
- If I Could Open You
- p. 93
- Chance of Showers
- pp. 95-98
- Day Begins at Governor’s Square Mall
- pp. 99-100
- The Luncheon of the Boating Party
- pp. 101-103
- Morning Song
- p. 104
- Adventures in Sepia
- pp. 106-107
- A Funny Joke
- pp. 111-112
- The Party’s End
- pp. 113-114
- IV. Often in Different Landscapes (1976)
- pp. 115-116
- What the New Chef Said
- p. 118
- California
- p. 119
- Little Keats Soliloquy
- p. 122
- East Texas
- p. 124
- Summer in Fairbanks
- p. 126
- The North Slope
- pp. 127-129
- The Polar Bear
- p. 130
- But Once in Special
- p. 131
- Religious Poem
- p. 133
- This Other
- p. 134
- To His Book
- p. 135
Additional Information
Copyright
2016