L' Heure Bleue
Published on 4. January 2021
96 pages
978-1-939568-55-7 (ISBN)
Description
Elisa Gabbert's L'Heure Bleue, or the Judy Poems, goes inside the mind of Judy, one of three characters in Wallace Shawn's The Designated Mourner, a play about the dissolution of a marriage in the midst of political revolution. In these poems, Gabbert imagines a back story and an emotional life for Judy beyond and outside the play. Written in a voice that is at once intellectual and unselfconscious, these poems create a character study of a many-layered woman reflected in solitude, while engaging with larger questions of memory, identity, desire, surveillance, and fear.
More details
Person
Elisa Gabbert is the author of five collections of poetry, essays, and criticism: The Unreality of Memory & Other Essays, forthcoming in August 2020 from FSG Originals (available for preorder now) and Atlantic UK; The Word Pretty (Black Ocean, 2018); L'Heure Bleue, or the Judy Poems (Black Ocean, 2016); The Self Unstable (Black Ocean, 2013); and The French Exit (Birds LLC, 2010). The Word Pretty was a New York Times Editors' Pick, and The Self Unstable was chosen by the New Yorker as one of the best books of 2013. She writes a regular poetry column for the New York Times, and her work has appeared in Harper's, The New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine and Book Review, the New York Review of Books, the Guardian Long Read, the London Review of Books, A Public Space, the Paris Review Daily, American Poetry Review, and many other venues.
Content
- Cover
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Contents
- I'm not in love with Jack.
- I.
- Am I the sea?
- Jack always feels like someone is watching.
- At the poetry reading,
- Some days I can't escape the feeling
- A walk helps a little, a pause
- We go to see the glass flowers
- I'm not interested in art today.
- The melo- in melodramatic
- Jack is jealous
- The day the torture report comes out,
- When I say what I think,
- I am not very clever today.
- The scientist is oddly optimistic,
- To avoid Jack when he's sad-
- A little drunk in the park with Jack
- Art should be easy-
- When we argue about war,
- Names of girls.
- II.
- There are certain points in time
- After a seizure,
- When I was a girl,
- Lately before bed
- I wake up with bumps
- I go to the movies,
- Nostalgia is the only cure
- This convention of saying we're "fine"
- Just like the future,
- In one of those blank
- When I read old entries in my journal,
- On TV, people walk into your house
- Something about fish
- I don't fantasize about sex,
- I have discovered
- I'm happiest when I live simply,
- In the too bright
- As it is, I feel nothing
- One fact about Jack:
- Adorno's famous line
- I have thought enough
- I find an old typed up paper:
- I knew he would go.
- I could know him, and like him,
- The day after Christmas,
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
