August Kleinzahler’s collections include Green Sees Things in Waves; The Strange Hours Travellers Keep, which won the Griffin Poetry Prize; Sleeping It Off in Rapid City, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award; The Hotel Oneira and Snow Approaching on the Hudson. His memoir of his childhood in New Jersey, Cutty, One Rock, came out in 2005. Much of it first appeared in the LRB, as did many of the pieces included in Sallies, Romps, Portraits and Send-Offs: Selected Prose 2000-2016.
Imagine in all the debris of space The countless trade names
Jugurtha Tuwolomne Chert-Farms
Some of these belong to you Can you tell which ones Each has its own sequence of microtones Together they make up a kind of tune Your tune The ceiling and walls are star maps Breathing, alive Those aren’t stars, darling That’s your nervous system Nanna didn’t...
The Tartar swept across the plain In their furs and silk panties Snub-nosed monkeymen with cinders for eyes Attached to their ponies like centaurs Forcing the snowy passes of the Carpathians Streaming from defiles like columns of ants Arraying their host in a vasty wheel White, grey, black and chestnut steeds Ten thousand each to a quadrant Turning, turning at the Jenuye’s command This...
Another season comes to a close. Sunflowers nod, the mallards grow restive and hoarfrost sparkles on the lawns well into morning. After some discussion, the badminton nets finally come down. For one last time the cleaning ladies strip off the bedclothes of the week’s guest artist and do what they can with the wine stains. – Jerk, they say to themselves, village girls with almost...
For Christopher Logue
The talk-radio host is trying to shake the wacko with only a minute left to get in the finance and boner-pill spots before signing off, the morning news team already at the door and dairy vans streaming from the gates of WholesomeBest, fanning out across the vast plateau. Fair skies, high cumulus cloud – the birds are in full throat as dawn ignites in the east,...
On a fine, late October afternoon in 1957 I came home from school to a great commotion at the foot of the block where we lived. TV trucks and news reporters were clustered at the gates to the long drive leading up to Albert Anastasia’s enormous Spanish Mission-style home. The Palisades section of Fort Lee, New Jersey, then as now, was a sleepy, leafy enclave, overlooking the Upper West...
The poems in Live from the Hong Kong Nile Club are taken from August Kleinzahler’s first six publications. All were small press books with relatively limited circulations – the first,...
In a power-rhyming slap-happy parody of Thirties doom-mongering published in 1938 William Empson famously had ‘Just a Smack at Auden’: What was said by Marx, boys, what did he...
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