Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • 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
Notes for a Late-Blooming Martyr

Notes for a Late-Blooming Martyr

West, Marlys

Paperback

Series: Akron Series in Poetry (Paperback)

General Poetry

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 1884836569
ISBN13: 9781884836565
Publisher: Univ Of Akron Pr
Published: Oct 1 1999
Pages: 80
Weight: 0.30
Height: 0.30 Width: 5.90 Depth: 8.80
Language: English
In Notes for a Late-Blooming Martyr, Marlys West takes a coolly amused look at what we create of ourselves: our habits of home and mind, the prosthetics and courtesies, the small timid gestures and screaming leaps that make up our lives and deaths. Influenced by such diverse things as summer vacations, the plight of Satan and the saints, and a love of American speech, these poems suggest a loose narrative within a stream of wry images and wayward mythologies. Father smokes, mother rolls her eyes, the devil goes for a swim---all in a world of odd rituals, dangerous waters, lucky charms, and the spasmodic braveries of the everyday. From the desertion of the past comes recitation of longings gratified or unheard, an accompaniment to the martyrdom and beauty of each life. Tragedy never rises to the level of transcendence, but neither is it the only truth. Marlys West dismantles old answers---religion, love, family, the comfort and security of objects---and offers them again as skewed solutions, the wary possibilities of transformation, in a book that ends as we all do, with the ceremonies of dying and the frightened hope of another life.

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