ominous music intensifying : poems

Title:

Author:

Teague, Alexandra, 1974- author.

Summary:

In poems that bring together traditional American patriotic songs and current American horrors―and in which Yeats' famous apocalyptic figure of the Rough Beast takes a painting class, wears a spacesuit, and listens to public service announcements―[ominous music intensifying] takes on the too-muchness of contemporary, apocalypse-prone America with humor, conscience, and the occasional fiddle duel. In this fourth book of poetry, Alexandra Teague expands her subject matter to include chronic pain, generational poverty, and what it means to stay safe―physically and psychologically. Her new poems are reckonings with sexism and dental trauma, Mitch McConnell and UFOs, torture devices and sad clown paintings―and with some of the most urgent crises of our time: gun violence, pandemics, and climate change.-- Amazon

General Note:

"A Karen & Michael Braziller book."

Contents:

America the Beautiful: Thriftstore -- "Orange Blossom Special" (arranged for Rome's burning) -- The Horse That Threw Me -- The Rough Beast Listens to a PSA from Lake America -- Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory -- The Rough Beast Receives an Invitation from America -- Correlations -- Sad Clown Paintings -- Crossed Letters from a Concerned American -- [It is undone business I speak of, this morning] -- "My Country, 'Tis of Thee" (arranged for Brazen Bull) -- The Rough Beast Goes to Outer Space -- Field Blocks -- America: Hepatomancy -- The Rough Beast Takes a Painting Class -- The Years I Lived Beneath the Lake -- Mean High Water -- The Rough Beast Would Like The Future To Be Clear -- Lake Chacolet -- Closed Captions -- The Goth Comes Clean About Decay -- When, Like Garden Spiders from Space Orbit, We Return -- Eclipses -- The Rough Beast Talks to the Falcon -- [I have had to learn the simplest things last. Which made for difficulties.] -- Cambium -- In the Glass Labyrinth at the Nelson Atkins Art Museum, the Rough Beast is Mistaken for the Minotaur -- The Rough Beast Literally Arrives -- Notes on the Poems.

Physical Description:

pages cm

Genre:

Poetry.

Publisher:

Persea Books,

Publication Date:

2024

ISBN:

9780892556069

Publication Information:

New York : Persea Books, 2024.

Call Number:

811.6 TEAGUE

Holds: Copies:

Available:*

Item Barcode	Collection	Call Number	Status	Item Holds
33607003751164	New Adult Nonfiction	811.6 TEAGUE	Searching... Unknown	Searching... Unavailable

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On Order

Summary

In poems that bring together traditional American patriotic songs and current American horrors-and in which Yeats' famous apocalyptic figure of the Rough Beast takes a painting class, wears a spacesuit, and listens to public service announcements-[ominous music intensifying] takes on the too-muchness of contemporary, apocalypse-prone America with humor, conscience, and the occasional fiddle duel. In this fourth book of poetry, Alexandra Teague expands her subject matter to include chronic pain, generational poverty, and what it means to stay safe-physically and psychologically. Her new poems are reckonings with sexism and dental trauma, Mitch McConnell and UFOs, torture devices and sad clown paintings-and with some of the most urgent crises of our time: gun violence, pandemics, and climate change.

Author Notes

Alexandra Teague is the author of two previous books of poetry--Mortal Geography, winner of Persea's 2009 Lexi Rudnitsky Prize and the 2010 California Book Award, and The Wise and Foolish Builders--and the novel The Principles Behind Flotation. She is also co-editor of Bullets into Bells: Poets and Citizens Respond to Gun Violence. A former Stegner Fellow and National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, Alexandra is a professor at University of Idaho .

Reviews (2)

Publisher's Weekly Review

The candid fourth collection from Teague (Or What We'll Call Desire) depicts memories of her Arkansas childhood. The title, inspired by a caption from a movie Teague watched during the pandemic, captures the speaker's restlessness. Yeats's apocalyptic Rough Beast from his poem "The Second Coming" makes multiple appearances, taking a painting class and listening "to a PSA from Lake America." As Teague takes on gun violence, pollution, greed, and Mitch McConnell, she writes, "We all go swimming in moonlight/ that's really a cow pond: that clay-suck-and-cow-shit squelching the slits/ between our toes like we're a creature evolving from webbed feet/ or back again; duckweed gritty on our t-shirts because the August heat/ of our own fears has become unbearable." She invokes her homeland in all its tacky glory and sordid history, from carnival rides to the Klan: "Hands in the air/ for the Bald Knobbers with their black-horned masks and cutout/ eye holes, who set the fire, who no one mentioned, helped set/ the Ozarks on the tracks of whiteness." The dense and lengthy poem "Mean High Water: An American Gyre" blends Annie Edson Taylor's Niagara Falls barrel plunge ("I/ hoped, she said, to aid myself financially") with glimmers of other near drownings, including the speaker's divorce. With urgency and skill, Teague captures the dangers and disillusionment of contemporary America. (Oct.)

Library Journal Review

"About this country: who gets to dive and rise / and who gets trampled like the vintage, I still can't see / the justice" says Teague (Mortal Geography) in one of the many expansive poems in her powerful (and sometimes overpowering) latest. This is classic Teague, using language that's urgent and direct to capture her anger at the depredations evident in U.S. history and culture, the reassuring lies and earnest mythologizing. One long poem addressing a glib comment Mitch McConnell made about young people rages at his out-of-touch heartlessness and finally concludes, "I think we're seeing the directions wrong, / or looking in too few. We're talking stock markets versus aliens when / what we need is fields of real living corn." Like many of Teague's poems, which frequently reference her Arkansas/Texas upbringing, "Orange Blossom Special (arranged for Rome's burning)" offers a disquieting look at nostalgia for the presumed good old days, with a fiddle in an Ozark theater eerily echoing the sound of a train carrying white people to 1940s Florida. "The train that's not a train / is screeching closer, whistling and wheedling" says one line, just one example of how viscerally she communicates sight and sound. VERDICT Engaged, propulsive poetry for anyone concerned about U.S culture today.