Wrong
Published on 30. July 2014
113 pages
978-0-8229-7970-8 (ISBN)
Description
The poems of Reginald Shepherd's third book move among, mix, and manufacture stories, seeking to redefine the meaning of mythology. From the ruined representatives of Greek divinity (broken statues and fragmented stories), and the dazzling extravagances of predecessors like Hart Crane and Wallace Stevens, to the fleeting promises of popular music and the laconic demigods of the contemporary gay subculture, they sketch maps of a world in which desire may find a restless home. But desire leads the maps astray and maps mislead desire. The poems poems both enact language's powers to create a world and enforce the world's insistence (material, social, sexual, racial, historical) that mind (and body) surrender to circumstance. The struggle between these two halves that will never make a whole produces new myths of occasion, "packing the rifts/with sleeplessness, filling the gaps with lack." In that space between promise and deprivation, Wrong builds its song.
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Person
Reginald Shepherd (1963-2008) was a Black, gay poet who grew up in the Bronx and went on to receive two MFAs, one from Brown University and one from the Iowa Writers Workshop. He authored two collections of poetry criticism and six poetry collections, all published by the University of Pittsburgh Press: Red Clay Weather, Fata Morgana, Otherhood, Wrong, Angel, Interrupted, and Some Are Drowning. His work has been widely awarded and anthologized and has appeared in four editions of The Best American Poetry and two Pushcart Prize anthologies. Shepherd received many awards and honors over his career, including grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, among others.
Content
- Intro
- Contents
- Before
- Part 1
- Geology of Water
- Kneeling Self-Portrait
- At the End of Outside
- Antibody
- Another Unclassical Eclogue
- Placet Futile
- The Beautiful
- Salt Point
- Deepest of the Great Lakes, Largest Too
- Where It Passes, Untouchable
- Lens
- Acmeist Night
- Surface Effects in Summer Wind
- Narcissus Poetica
- Solstice as Demon Lover
- Vampires
- Part II
- Hermes, the Trickster
- Another Conversation With the Moon
- About a Boy
- Another Movable Feast
- Locale
- Who Owns the Night and Leases Stars
- Moonlight on Endymion's Sleep
- Princes
- False Nocturne
- Popular Music of the Forties
- Saint Hyacinth
- Miscegenation
- A Photo of the Berberini Faun
- That Man
- Part III
- Littler Sonnet
- To the Southern Cross as It Disappears
- Some Maps
- This History of His Body
- Proprioception
- Brightens
- From the World of Matter
- Seven Little Songs About the Moon
- Motive
- Dear Blackbird
- Cities for Carter
- Also Love You
- Part IV
- Nights and Days of Nineteen-Something
- Crepuscular
- Telemachus on the Waterfront
- At the Grave of Hart Crane
- Icarus on Fire Island
- The Little Mermaid's Fortune Teller
- Shipwreck and Drift
- Michael Who Walks by Night
- S'il Meurt
- L'Après-Midi
- World
- Acknowledgments
