Jackknife: New and Selected Poems

Description

In Jackknife: New and Selected Poems, Beatty travels the turns and collisions of over twenty years of work. She moves from first-person narratives to poems that straddle the page in fragments, to lines that sprawl with long lines of train tracks. Always landing in meaning, we are inside the body—not in a confessional voice, not autobiography—but arriving through the expanded, exploded image of many stories and genders.   The new poems leap imagistically from the known world to the purely imagined, as in the voice in "Abortion with Gun Barrel": "I am the counselor,/there are cracks in the barrel of the gun/there is aiming/shots of sorrow—/ shots of light.” Commitment to a rabid feminist voice continues, but arrival has a new ring to it, with beginnings rescripted: “I am a bastard./I walk around in this body of mine."   Beatty’s fascination with the highway and the breakout West jackknifes at the crossroads of the brutal and the white plains of loss—the body torn down and resurrected in the twenty first century. Contents New Poems 1. Inside the Cardinal Stricken The Kindness The Secret Book and Record Store Asylum Abortion with Gun Barrel The World between Jim Morrison’s Legs Low-Rider Lake is a red pigment She Set Me Swimming Dropping Blotter Acid at the Slag Dump 2. Praise Blue Surfing Cowboys The Snapping The Boy from Hazard Blue Rider An eater, or swallowhole, is a reach of stream Against Suicide Taking Off, I Talk to the Dead Wedding Shoes I Knew I Wasn’t Poor Muscle Beach, Venice, 2013 from Mad River If This Is Sex, It Must Be Tuesday Mad River The Rolling Rock Man Pittsburgh Poem Ravenous Blue Highway 99 Letter to Mario An Abortion Attempt by my Mother Sucking Saving the Crippled Boy after sex on a train A Waitress’ Instructions on Tipping or Get the Cash Up and Don’t Waste My Time from Boneshaker Machine Shop of Love Penitentiary My Mother and Aunt Charlotte Talk Disasters at Schmotzer’s Village Bakery Going Deep for Jesus Poetry Workshop at the Homeless Shelter My Father Teaches Me Desire Near the Foundling Home My Father Teaches Me to Dream Boneshaker My Father Teaches Me Light Zen of Tipping Cruising the Blue Belt from Red Sugar I Saw One of Blake’s Angels Lip Shooter Red Sugar The Phenomenology of Sex When Foucault Entered the Body The Day I Stripped Red Song Serum A Necessary Waist: Plath Grows Thinner Reading Stein Dreaming Door The Punch Love Poem w/Strat Daughter of Blue Lake from the Switching/Yard Visitation at Gogama California Corridor My Mother Was a Dress Sister as Moving Object Three Faces and All These Fallen Gods Delicious Top-10 List Youngest Known Savior Reading Wanda Coleman on the California Zephyr The Switching/Yard The Hit Man Ghostdaddys Dear American Poetry Drinking the Lizard King Notes on a Nevada Flood Notes Acknowledgments