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
West Portal

West Portal

Gucciardi, Benjamin

Paperback

Series: Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry

General Poetry

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 1647690404
ISBN13: 9781647690403
Publisher: University of Utah Press
Published: Jul 30 2021
Pages: 64
Weight: 0.26
Height: 0.30 Width: 5.80 Depth: 8.30
Language: English
Winner of the 2020 Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize

West Portal is the name of the neighborhood in San Francisco, California, where poet Benjamin Gucciardi grew up. It is also one of the names of the Pillars of Heracles--the entryway to the afterworld. Drawing on William Carlos Williams's assertion that the local is the only thing that is universal, West Portal investigates the Bay Area's urban and rural landscapes along with the memories and people that reside there. Interweaving the narrative of the death of the poet's sister with the environmental and socioeconomic realities of the current moment, the poems in West Portal illuminate the experience of loss, and the attempt to create meaning in the wake of devastation. Through poems that are prayerful, observant, elegiac, pained, dreamlike, philosophical, and compassionate, the book asks: What do we consider holy? What is virtue? What should any of us value about our relationship to place or our relationship with each other?

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