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
That Special Something

That Special Something

Popielaski, John
Haugen, Hayley

Paperback

General Poetry

ISBN10: 1962405214
ISBN13: 9781962405218
Publisher: Sheila-Na-Gig Editions
Published: Jun 30 2025
Pages: 118
Weight: 0.32
Height: 0.28 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.50
Language: English

That Special Something is about ideals and compromises, aspirations, good-faith efforts, and the specter of futility. There's ample grief, but, with apologies to Robert Frost, there's also ample grievance, for it is in grievance that the gods allow more latitude for humor. What sort of humor? If you took a Vanitas/Memento Mori painter, converted such into a poet, made it so that the perspective shifted to include more flora and more animals, more waterways and beer, more cracked corn and more longing for the father, more references to weaponry and xenia, more fretting since, collectively, we're so much closer to the end, you'd have the sort of gallows humor that prevails here. Yet there's poignancy. There's beauty. There is joy. It's like the death's head on the cover, a reminder of the obvious, of the impending simplification. In the meantime, we are free to take a smoke, to be surrounded by as many flowers as we can, to grin as though we really don't have anything to lose.

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