I will destroy you: poems

Description

The newest collection from Nick Flynn, whose "songs of experience hum with immediacy" (The New York Times) Beginning with a poem called "Confessional" and ending with a poem titled "Saint Augustine," Nick Flynn's I Will Destroy You interrogates the potential of art to be redemptive, to remake and reform. But first the maker of art must claim responsibility for his past, his actions, his propensity to destroy others and himself. "Begin by descending," Augustine says, and the poems delve into the deepest, most defeating parts of the self: addiction, temptation, infidelity, and repressed memory. These are poems of profound self-scrutiny and lyric intensity, jagged and probing. I Will Destroy You is an honest accounting of all that love must transcend and what we must risk for its truth. One. Confessional -- Pied Piper -- Balcony -- Poem to be whispered by the bedside of a sleeping child -- Tattoo -- The unclaimed -- Horse thief -- What you can't hear -- Alphabet Street -- Now -- The ethics of the third person -- Cemetery Saint Louis -- I will destroy you -- Two. See through -- Sleeping Beauty -- Haecceity -- Rock 'n' roll suicide -- The child -- Prince performing "Motherless child" (live) -- Unghosted -- Amanuensis -- Parrot -- Kurt Cobain wallpaper -- Unknown -- Dharma -- Uncloudy day -- Life is sweet -- Popsicles -- Sky burial Three. Killdeer -- Icarus -- Acceptance -- God's will -- If only they could bottle this feeling -- Saltmarsh -- As I lay dying -- Shipwreck -- The box -- The angel of forgetting -- On the anniversary of my mother's suicide my daughter & I take the C Train to the Museum of Natural History -- The king of fire -- Daughter -- If I speak for the dead I must leave -- Saint Augustine.