The Next Infinity
- ISBN-10
- 193796860X
- ISBN-13
- 9781937968601
- Category
- American poetry
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2019
- Publisher
- Broadstone Books
- Author
- Nancy C. Botkin
Description
Poetry. There is something wondrously imponderable about the title of Nancy Botkin's latest poetry collection: the next infinity. What would that be like, the something that comes after everything? After negotiating one's way through religion, through the legacy and loss of parents, through a past receding "small and dim" as the memories of scratchy songs on an AM car radio, through moments fleeting like "ice cream melting faster than we could eat it." At another point she observes, "I'm starting to wonder if I'm in this poem / all by myself." A bit later, in the same poem, she asks "if we are keepers of our own asylum." By unpacking the experience of radical isolation in such unflinching terms, Botkins reveals how we are each our own infinity. And because we share this, we are not so alone after all. It's a lot to think about, and at times she acts as if she'd rather not: "My brain is even less inviting / when it's wild with dark birds flitting / through its spangled hallways." Perhaps less inviting to Botkin, but it is a blessing to her readers who join with those birds flitting through the hallway of her rich imagination. The final image of the book is a cosmic parlor trick, and perhaps that is all life is. And if so, these poems assure us, that's enough.
Get the book
Similar books
-
The Poetry of Lucy Maud Montgomery
By Lucy Maud MontgomeryThe poems in this collection by Lucy Maud Montgomery were written to reach the readers she thought of as "kindred spirits" - those thousands of people who then, as now, would be as deeply moved as she was by beauty in nature and in spirit.
-
Iron Rose: New York Poems
By Douglas Nicholas... lines that, like so many magicians, conjure a rabbit there for her pleasure Spark-charged Jim, he'd throw off nine new ideas a minute; most were wildly impractical or even silly but some, some were ingenious; he could shower sparks ...
-
The Essential Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe
By Edgar Allan PoeAn anthology of short stories and poems by Edgar Allan Poe including "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," "The Purloined Letter," "Annabel Lee," and "The Raven."
-
Edgar Allan Poe: Short Stories, Poems, Novels
By Edgar Allan PoeEdgar Allan Poe: Short Stories, Poems, Novels
-
Graphic Classics: Edgar Allan Poe
By Edgar Allan PoePresents a collection of tales from Edgar Allan Poe in an illustrated format by prominent artists working in the fields of comics, book illustration, and fine arts.
-
The Book of Assassinations: Prose Poems
By Robert GibbonsSo today I board the later , slower Matthew J. Hughes to do just that , fetch the burgeoning language . At the moment , the sun at stern , David's latest postcard , a Tapies collage sent from Barcelona marking the page I was reading ...
-
Laura Ingalls Wilder's Fairy Poems
By Laura Ingalls WilderLaura Ingalls Wilder shares her vision of the fanciful, ethereal, and mischievous world of the "Little People" in this first-ever collection of fairy poems she wrote in 1915.
-
Complicated Grief
By Laura MullenAnd not the least of this book's disconcerting, but strangely salutary, powers is that, under its stimulus, you can't help starting back.
-
Selected Poems: in Five Sets
By Laura, Laura RidingSelected Poems: in Five Sets
-
The Complete Poetry of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1884-1935: Together with Commentary and Notes
By Charlotte Perkins GilmanThis book also makes available a full index of poem titles to assist scholars, students, and critics in finding and contextualizing Gilman's poetry.