Almanac : : Poems / / Austin Smith.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Princeton University Press eBook-Package Backlist 2000-2013
• VerfasserIn: Smith, Austin,
• Place / Publishing House: Princeton, NJ : : Princeton University Press, , [2013]; ©2014
• Year of Publication: 2013
• Edition: Course Book
• Language: English
• Series: Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets ; 63
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (96 p.)

Almanac is a collection of lyrical and narrative poems that celebrate, and mourn the passing of, the world of the small family farm. But while the poems are all involved in some way with the rural Midwest, particularly with the people and land of the northwestern Illinois dairy farm where Austin Smith was born and raised, they are anything but merely regional. As the poems reflect on farm life, they open out to speak about childhood and death, the loss of tradition, the destruction of the natural world, and the severing of connections between people and the land. This collection also reflects on a long poetic apprenticeship. Smith's father is a poet himself, and Almanac is in part a meditation about the responsibility of the poet, especially the young poet, when it falls to him to speak for what is vanishing. To "e another Illinois poet, Thomas James, Smith has attempted in this book to write poems "clear as the glass of wine / on [his] father's table every Christmas Eve." By turns exhilarating and disquieting, this is a remarkable debut from a distinctive new voice in American poetry.______ From Almanac:THE MUMMY IN THE FREEPORT ART MUSEUM Austin Smith ? Amongst the masterpieces of the small-town Picassos and Van Goghs and photographs of the rural poor and busts of dead Greeks or the molds of busts donated by the Art Institute of Chicago to this dying town's little museum, there was a mummy, a real mummy, laid out in a dim-lit room by himself. I used to go to the museum just to visit him, a pharaoh who, expecting an afterlife of beautiful virgins and infinite food and all the riches and jewels he'd enjoyed in earthly life, must have wondered how the hell he'd ended up in Freeport, Illinois. And I used to go alone into that room and stand beside his sarcophagus and say, "My friend, I've asked myself the same thing."

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- The Silo -- Queen-Anne's Lace -- Fort-Da -- Thistles -- The Night My Mother -- How a Calf Comes into the World -- Lightning -- Autumn's Velocity -- The Brinkmeiers -- Aerial Photograph, Glasser Farm, 1972 -- Dean -- Coach Chance -- The Man Accused of Fucking Horses -- The Bait Shop -- Memoir of My Imaginary Sister -- Neon Apotheosis -- Bingo -- Stephenson County Fair in Wartime -- Nancy and Dwayne, Danville, Virginia, 1970 -- Romeo and Juliet in the Tomb -- The Battlefield -- The Pit -- The Man Who Poisoned Robert Johnson -- Nazi Soldier with a Book in His Pants -- Sharpener of Knives -- Overlord -- The Hotel -- The Equation -- Resonance -- Postcards to Andrew Wyeth -- Recollection -- Letter to My Father Written in a Bar in Mitchell, South Dakota -- On a Greyhound Bus in America -- Mission -- The Scythe -- The Mummy in the Freeport Art Museum -- Sirens -- A Serious House on Serious Earth -- Poem for Les, Homeless -- Elegy for Missing Teeth -- Directions for How to Use Crest Whitening Strips -- The Trencher -- Instructions for How to Put an Old Horse Down -- The Key in the Stone -- Wake -- Notes -- Acknowledgments