Phoenix Poets

Nate Klug

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780226197005
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

Milton's God
Where I-95 meets The Pike,
a ponderous thunderhead flowered—
 
stewed a minute, then flipped
like a flash card, tattered
edges crinkling in, linings so dark
with excessive bright
 
that, standing, waiting, at the overpass edge,
the onlooker couldn't decide
 
until the end, or even then,
what was revealed and what had been hidden.
 
 
Using a variety of forms and achieving a range of musical effects, Nate Klug's Anyone traces the unraveling of astonishment upon small scenes—natural and domestic, political and religious—across America's East and Midwest. The book's title foregrounds the anonymity it seeks through several means: first, through close observation (a concrete saw, a goshawk, a bicyclist); and, second, via translation (satires from Horace and Catullus, and excerpts from Virgil's Aeneid ). Uniquely among contemporary poetry volumes, Anyone demonstrates fluency in the paradoxes of a religious existence: "To stand sometime / outside my faith... or keep waiting / to be claimed in it." Engaged with theology and the classics but never abstruse, all the while the poems remain grounded in the phenomenal, physical world of "what it is to feel: /  moods, half moods, / swarming, then darting loose."

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Work

Conjugations

Milton’s God

Letter of Introduction, Samuel Palmer to His Patron

Thinking

The Choice

Dusk in Jasper County

Home

Neighbors

To Egnatius, Who Won’t Stop Smiling

Jon’s Jog

Advent

Parade

A Message

Lullaby on Election Eve

Lost Seasons

Shifts

In Calico Rock, Arkansas

Novitiate

Gift

Three Days

Octonaire on the World’s Vanity and Inconstancy

Sound from Sound

Sacred Harp Sing, Bethel Primitive Baptist

Anyone

Dare

Errand

Predestination

The Truly Fucked

Petition

The Gladiator

Twenty-Something

Trail

True Love

Squirrels

Mercy

Observer

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to the editors of the following journals:

Common Knowledge: “Predestination,” “Three Days”

Free Verse: “Sound from Sound,” “Thinking”

Harvard Divinity Bulletin and NPR.org: “Mercy”

Poetry: “Advent,” “The Choice,” “Conjugations,” “Dare,” “Milton’s God,” “Observer,” “Parade,” “Squirrels,” “True Love,” “Work”

Poetry Northwest: “Home,” “Neighbors,” “Novitiate,” “The Truly Fucked”

The Threepenny Review: “In Calico Rock, Arkansas”

The Yale Review: Part of “Lost Seasons” as “End of Autumn”

Zoland Poetry: “Errand”

Some of these poems were first collected in a chapbook, Consent (Brooklyn, NY: Pressed Wafer, 2012).

WORK

It hides its edges

in speed, it has

no edges. Plus every time

he thinks he knows

it closely enough—can discrimi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Series Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Work
• Conjugations
• Milton’s God
• Letter of Introduction, Samuel Palmer to His Patron
• Thinking
• The Choice
• Dusk in Jasper County
• Home
• Neighbors
• To Egnatius, Who Won’t Stop Smiling
• Jon’s Jog
• Advent
• Parade
• A Message
• Lullaby on Election Eve
• Lost Seasons
• Shifts
• In Calico Rock, Arkansas
• Novitiate
• Gift
• Three Days
• Octonaire on the World’s Vanity and Inconstancy
• Sound from Sound
• Sacred Harp Sing, Bethel Primitive Baptist
• Anyone
• Dare
• Errand
• Predestination
• The Truly Fucked
• Petition
• The Gladiator
• Twenty-Something
• Trail
• True Love
• Squirrels
• Mercy
• Observer