In this Book
- Inverse Sky
- Book
- 2008
- Published by: University of Iowa Press
- Series: Kuhl House Poets
summary
Part Baudelairian flâneur, an Arcadian shepherd, the speaker in John Isles’s brave new Inverse Sky encounters a fragmented history. It is nineteenth-century California, and the missions are still burning after the Americans establish the Bear Flag Republic; it is the twenty-first century, and the miners of 49 are relegated to a mural in an arcade. Both a loner and a lover, Isles’s pilgrim-poet takes us on a journey where Native Americans are “missing persons” outside a diorama of their ancestors, then sets us adrift in settings ranging from film noir to the clear-cut hills of modern-day California landscapes, under siege but not defeated.
Inverse Sky evokes the paradigm of a shocked and disbelieving child dealing with a broken promise, yet the poems carry within themselves the knowledge that promises will be kept. The only response to broken promises is “to come undone / to come and go in a single breath.” But this is a beginning as well as an end. Each poem becomes a new world—for if there is anything on earth worth loving, it is something made with the world as it has been handed down to us. Inverse Sky is an insistent effort to "love the things not loving back.”
Inverse Sky evokes the paradigm of a shocked and disbelieving child dealing with a broken promise, yet the poems carry within themselves the knowledge that promises will be kept. The only response to broken promises is “to come undone / to come and go in a single breath.” But this is a beginning as well as an end. Each poem becomes a new world—for if there is anything on earth worth loving, it is something made with the world as it has been handed down to us. Inverse Sky is an insistent effort to "love the things not loving back.”
Table of Contents
Download Full Book
- Title Page, Copyright
- pp. iii-vi
- Acknowledgments
- pp. ix-x
- Part 1
- Lighthouse
- p. 3
- Cinema Verité
- p. 7
- Missing Persons
- p. 8
- Course in Empire
- p. 11
- City of Our Making
- p. 16
- Part 2
- Desperate Tender
- pp. 20-22
- Dark Pastoral
- p. 23
- Send My Roots Rain
- pp. 24-28
- Notes toward a Social Realism
- pp. 29-30
- Sidereal Messengers
- pp. 31-32
- Part 3
- The Arcadia Negotiations
- pp. 37-44
- Part 4
- The Next Loneliness
- pp. 47-48
- The Hunger
- p. 53
- Night Vision
- p. 54
- The Eden Archives
- pp. 59-60
- Kuhl House Poets
- p. 62
Additional Information
ISBN
9781587297274
Related ISBN(s)
9781587296864
DOI
MARC Record
OCLC
646887542
Pages
72
Launched on MUSE
2012-02-08
Language
English
Open Access
No
Copyright
2008