1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910962881303321

Autore

Atkinson Colette LaBouff

Titolo

Mean / / Colette LaBouff Atkinson

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Chicago, : University of Chicago Press, 2008

ISBN

1-282-53767-9

9786612537677

0-226-03060-1

Edizione

[1st ed.]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (62 p.)

Collana

Phoenix poets

Disciplina

811/.6

Soggetti

Prose poems, American

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di contenuto

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Space Race -- Mean -- Mean, Part Two -- Medium Intense Red Copper -- Rocket -- Loose -- Heat Wave -- Hart Crane Slept Here -- Four -- London (1987) -- Wrecking -- Three Days of the Condor -- The Glass Show Lounge -- Bakasana -- Deal -- "I'm sorry I was blind" -- Hover -- Intention (The Dead Leaves) -- Gain -- Spring Fling -- New World -- Laurel -- Replacement Monkey -- Spirit -- Proximity -- Juju's Sister -- Gun Dog -- Flower Girl -- Park Bench -- "Perhaps this verse would please you better-Sue-(2)" -- Prosthetic -- Garden Variety -- "For God's sake, get out" -- Route -- 1652 -- Graphic Novel Romance (V for Vendetta) -- Ghost Squad -- Hips -- 1971 -- Port of Los Angeles -- "Taking it like a little soldier, aren't you?" -- Fortune-Telling -- Gardena Freeway, California -- Notes

Sommario/riassunto

In the appropriately titled Mean, Colette LaBouff Atkinson's speakers confront a series of cruel lovers, estranged ex-husbands and ex-ex-wives, neglectful parents, disrespectful children, menacing drunks, would-be rapists, well-meaning but ineffectual teachers, and that annoying kid in first grade who wouldn't leave you alone. Managing to "say" what most of us would only think but never dare speak out loud, this stunning debut collection reveals that the horrors and cruelty we experience in everyday life can turn out to be very real indeed. But Atkinson does not merely rake her subjects across the coals: she deftly



exposes, instead, how the world mirrors back to us our own meanness, lending it a truth and a history. In forty-three deadpan, often merciless prose poems that are masterpieces of the form, Mean lays bare the darkness within the narrator's heart as well as in ours. "Colette Labouff Atkinson's artful laconicism attains the force of a shout, without ever raising its voice. The intelligent, merciless narrative cool arrays a sad comedy, with an unemphatic but penetrating 'and then . . . and then': accounts of love pursued far more often than it is glimpsed or realized."-Robert Pinsky