Death of a Ventriloquist

Acknowledgments

ix Acknowledgments Grateful acknowledgment is made to the editors of the magazines in which versions of these poems first appeared: 32 Poems: “The Origin of Pigeons” and “The Worst First Line”; Agenda (UK): “Caravaggio’s Peter”; Agni Online: “Explanation Beginning with a River”; Backwards City Review: “Rider Unhorsed” and “Months Later the Lawyer Returned” from “A Brief History of the Decline”; Bellevue Literary Review : “Worry Bone”; Blackbird: “Inspiration,” “Ventriloquist on an Off Day,” and “Ventriloquist on the Moor”; Borderlands : Texas Poetry Review: “Still Life, Young Woman at the Water’s Edge”; Guernica: “Visiting Chicago”; Linebreak: “More Matter, Less Art”; Maine Magazine: “Proof #4”; Poetry Northwest: “On Leaving Home”; Prairie Schooner: “American Beech” and “Learning to Wait”; Tin House: “Four Planes of Experience”; The Café Review: “Guide” and “Panic Grass and Feverfew”; The New Republic: “Oakland Work Crew”; Southeast Review: “The Largest of the Circus Animals”; Western Humanities Review: “Phaëton”; Words and Images: “How to Make Fatherhood Lyrical,” “Maker,” “Notes on Thirty Years in the Life of a Ventriloquist,” and “The Nots.” “American Beech,” “Inspiration,” “Learning to Wait,” “More Matter, Less Art,” “Oakland Work Crew,” and “Ventriloquist on the Moor” also appear on fishousepoems.org, an audio archive of work by emerging poets. “On Leaving Home” was Poetry Northwest’s online feature for December 2007. “Rider Unhorsed” also appeared on Verse Daily for March 16, 2006. “Worry Bone” was awarded the Bellevue Literary Review’s 2006 Magliocco Prize for Poetry . “Four Planes of Experience” also appears in Satellite Convulsions (Tin House Books). x “Oakland Work Crew” also appears in From the Fishouse: An Anthology of Poems that Sing, Rhyme, Resound, Syncopate, Alliterate, and Just Plain Sound Great (Persea). A number of the poems here appear in Gaps in the Record, a signed and numbered limited edition chapbook (Warren Machine , 2008). Thanks to the Maine Arts Commission, which supported one major revision of this work. A mountain of gratitude goes to all of my teachers, including Christopher Merrill, whose undergraduate class changed my life, and Eamon Grennan, Marie Howe, Richard Howard, Lucie Brock-Broido, Glyn Maxwell, and Timothy Donnelly, for each providing wonderful and different examples of how to work and make poems. Thanks to Lisa Russ Spaar and John Poch, who saw that this was a book, and to the folks at University of North Texas Press for making it happen. Thanks to the many friends and fellow writers who took hammer and chisel to my work and provided encouragement along the way: Craig Teicher, Jesse Ball, Kevin Gonzalez, Keetje Kuipers, Patty Hagge, Jeffrey Thomson, and my longtime brother-in-writing, John Kovatch. And thanks also to my family, actual and adopted. To the writers, artists, and good people who are part of The Telling Room—thank you for inspiring me for more than five years. And to Renée, who believed even when I didn’t. And to Liam and Emmett, who shape my days. I hope you read this someday. ...