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
Preemptive Elegy

Preemptive Elegy

Bade, Scott

Paperback

General Poetry

ISBN10: 1639806539
ISBN13: 9781639806539
Publisher: Kelsay Books
Published: Sep 14 2024
Pages: 110
Weight: 0.35
Height: 0.23 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
In poems that move and accrue with the jazz-like fluidity of the mind, Scott Bade's newest collection emerges from the elegiac tradition, in which a death becomes a portal to meditations on love, selfhood, and the nature of memory itself. The portal likewise opens space for the contemplation of desire, perhaps grief's counterbalance. Desire is the color of what leaves / but never leaves, he writes, beautifully linking the twin forces of death and the erotic. At the book's epicenter is father-as potent presence, then absence, in the speaker's life, in fathering his own children, and in the larger, archetypal ramifications of the word. Oh seed, oh / bloom, oh line of lineage leaning for the exit, he writes of a son moving from the threshold into the world. Bade understands the affinity between loss and the lyric mode. It was a blow that would continue / to sing, he writes in one poem, and in another, describes silence, even, as a temple of listen, a song felt and unheard. Bade writes in both free verse improvisation and traditional and untraditional forms. One of my favorites is an erasure of a Dean Young poem, one of the book's muses. Erased, the opening reads simply, I love / My father / he's dead. From these seven syllables comes a mature leaning into concrete reality, and its transformation.


Also from

Bade, Scott

View All

Also in

General Poetry

View All