American Fractal

Timothy Green

Publication Year: 2009

Each portion forming a reduced-size copy of the whole, a fractal is forever fragmented, both chaotic and ordered, endlessly complex. Timothy Green's American Fractal sees this pattern emerge from the fabric of modern culture, as it navigates the personal, the political, and the metaphysical, in a lyric dreamscape in which an eerie chaos lurks just behind the facade of order--where "what looks like / a river...could be a log," "as if accident were / the fundamental attribute of life." In separate poems, one man sells ad space on his forehead, while another examines the multitudes of his own voice on an audio cassette recorder. Each life is but another section of the fractal, the past and the future two mirrors that face each other to perpetuate the illusion of infinites. At turns evocative and sweetly ironic, Green straddles the line between accessibility and complexity, exploring "how the wind whispers our secrets," how "that little tremor" of understanding "touches your sleeve, lets go."

Published by: Red Hen Press

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Book Details

E-ISBN-13: 9781597093798
Print-ISBN-13: 9781597091305
Print-ISBN-10: 1597091308

Page Count: 104
Publication Year: 2009

Edition: First

American Fractal

Title Page, Copyright, Acknowledgments, Dedication

Contents

I

The Body

Thanksgiving Was Over

Some Proof

To Montevideo

“Fifty-Hour Online Gaming Binge Proves Fatal”

Hip

Midnight Mass

Her Face Once

The Memory of Water

Poem from the Homeland

II

Poem from Dark Matter

Poem for the Valentines

Hiking Alone

Hiking Together

Beach Scene

2.9

What Passes for Optimism at MacArthur Park

How I’d Explain It

Playing Our Part

American Fractal

III

Cooking Dinner

After Hopper

Meditation on the Six Healing Sounds

“High on Hog”

Microcassette

Pot Luck

On the Phone My Mother

Before the Flood

Diorama

Beating Balaam’s Ass

IV

Old Mother Tarantula

“Man Auctions Ad Space on Forehead”

The Sense of Being Looked At

The Good Times

Pluots and Apriums

Cutlery

Impressionism

A Tourist’s Guide Through Big Sky Country

Apocrypha

Vigilance: What You’ll Miss

V

White Noise

Applauding the Gods

Saddled

The Urge to Break Things

Family Tree

The Space of One Nap

The Bending of Birches

A Constant Lack of Hunger

Cheers

In the Parking Lot of Our Dreams

Research Areas

Recommend

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