Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Hummingbird

Hummingbird

Barger, John Wall

Paperback

General Poetry

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 1926794087
ISBN13: 9781926794082
Publisher: Palimpsest Press
Published: Apr 15 2012
Pages: 80
Weight: 0.30
Height: 0.20 Width: 5.40 Depth: 8.50
Language: English
The Portuguese word for hummingbird is beija-flor: flower-kisser. In Aztec mythology, Huitzilopochtli is the hummingbird god, the bloodthirsty god of war, requiring nourishment in the form of constant human sacrifices to ensure that the sun will rise again. In this book, Barger documents his recent itinerant years in closely observed, honest, and sometimes surreal episodes: on the filthy streets of Delhi, in a junk pile in Mexico City, at a Coney Island sideshow, in the bathroom of a Oaxaca bus. The hummingbird is a territorial, aggressive creature whose life depends upon its quest for fuel, compelling it to taste up to one thousand flowers per day. Its pulse, as it flies eight hundred kilometers across the Gulf of Mexico, can rise up to twenty-one beats per second. In these gritty poems, the furor of the hummingbird's desire to survive and the roving spirit of the poet merge to compel a reading of life in flux that is at once breathtaking, agitated and fragile.

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