Loose Strife

Quan Barry

• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9780822980384
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

In poems initially inspired by Aeschylus' fifth-century B.C. trilogy "The Oresteia," which chronicles the fall of the House of Atreides, Loose Strife investigates the classical sense of loose strife, namely "to loose battle" or "sow chaos," a concept which is still very much with us more than twenty-five hundred years later.

Table of contents

• contents
• loose strife (“Somebody says draw a map”)
• loose strife (“Listen closely as I sing this”)
• loose strife (“Afterward one woman says”)
• loose strife (“As in loosely inspired by Aeschylus’s”)
• loose strife (“It seemed to come out rear first”)
• loose strife (“When he comes to the gate”)
• loose strife (“Even Homer recognizes the barbarism of the act”)
• loose strife (“Leonine”)
• loose strife (“I will not say its name”)
• ars
• loose strife (“When I first learned”)
• IV
• loose strife (“Say, when we woke”)
• loose strife (“Nights in the loft”)
• loose strife (“At dinner the following night”)
• loose strife (“There in the clouds”)
• Forward!
• loose strife (“At ninety-seven Mimi says”)
• variation (“Another example of this inability”)
• variation (“Conversely the conclusion of Stanislaw Lem’s 1961 novel”)
• craft (“The first great poet”)
• The Lord be with you but not also with you
• Noli Me Tangere
• craft (“The man in the Hawaiian shirt”)
• loose strife (“Embarrassingly it was just outside the tunnels”)
• Someone once said we were put on this earth to witness and testify
• Abortion on demand and without apology
• loose strife (“Everyone dreams of being harmed”)
• They say she went out through the living room window
• loose strife (“Some critics say”)
• loose strife (“Everywhere in the seven seas”)
• loose strife (“We are not allowed that”)
• Notes
• Acknowledgments