- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
About This Book
An exciting new collection from a poet whose debut was praised by Colorado Review as "a seduction by way of small astonishments" Nate Klug has been hailed by the Threepenny Review as a poet who is "an original in Eliot's sense of the word." In Hosts and Guests, his exciting second collection, Klug revels in slippery roles and shifting environments. The poems move from a San Francisco tech bar and a band of Pokémon Go players to the Shakers and St. Augustine, as they explore the push-pull between community and solitude, and past and present. Hosts and Guests gathers an impressive range: critiques of the "immiserated quiet" of modern life, love poems and poems of new fatherhood, and studies of a restless, nimble faith. At a time when the meanings of hospitality and estrangement have assumed a new urgency, Klug takes up these themes in chiseled, musical lines that blend close observation of the natural world, social commentary, and spiritual questioning. As Booklist has observed of his work, "The visual is rendered sonically, so perfectly one wants to involve the rest of the senses, to speak the lines, to taste the syllables."
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1.
MATINEE, END OF AUGUST
where it was safe to feel
we stumble out
with packs of strangers
exiting a jet,
crumbs and random warmths
scattered among the recliner seats.
seeps back slowly:
It ought to have rained.
Weâd wanted not to hurry.
But every door
knows weâre there already,
and slides open.
GHOST AT THE HY-VEE
his brotherâs service, condolences
over orange juiceâ but when I shook Danâs hand
Or Jack spoke âJackâ through me, slipping back
by vowel rhyme, and scrambling to remain
middayâs automatic produce mists. Cheeks drained,
then flushed, believing too much at once
fixed below on the ceiling fansâ reflectionsâ
each circulating blade leaking up
he laughed it off, clapping my back like a man,
like a Dan would, but more softly than that.
CHRISTMAS EVE, I-80, 10 P.M.
adjacent the rumble strip
a semi-trailer slumbers through
its own decomposing.
Tied with a skinny orange ribbon,
bleached inchoate bones
risen among the prairieâs ambered forms
and beached on an interstate ditch?
Once, an enormous seaway
flattened a plate and filled six hundred miles
in the middleâa wide shallow avenue
seething with animals:
picture them for company in the dark,
and the shifting bell curves of plankton
all thronging here, between Altoona
and The Lionâs Den, its lurid neon sign
newly redone, store lights still on.
HOSTS AND GUESTS
the forced deplaning thanks
to fog reports, after three thousand miles
all in all, easier than getting to Des Moinesââ
here they are again, though theyâve never been,
at the linty edge of the same turquoise couch.
What could we offer to repay them?
through carry-on Kleenex, hand over a folder
of direct mail addressed to us,
Their love an ebullition
of non sequiturs and questions
while you and I slip back
into randomly specific irritations,
Itâs like that time we gathered to watch
an old family VHSâ
your yellow bucket hat bleeding
into your toddler head, merging it with other heads,
in the kitchen laughed and cooed,
the merging getting worse the longer we tried
A week later, airport location
loaded on both their phones, after long hugs
finished first, stood looking at the sky
for several seconds), how empty
ransacked of their shadows, smells,
each familiar gestureâs weight. Straightening up,
but fighting off an unexpected grief,
alone as if for the first time.
EYE OF A NEEDLE
Mountain View Cemetery, Oakland
heads down as they fan out
from the parking circle, pistoning steep paths
beyond the columbaria,
Rihanna maybe hidden in one hand.
An open book, slab pages uncut;
a few cherubs, in need of a wash,
among the headstone crescentsâthen the mausoleums,
high...
Table of contents
- Cover Page
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Contents
- 1:
- 2:
- 3:
- 4:
- Notes
- Acknowledgments