This is the second collection from a Brooklyn poet whose work many readers will know from the New Yorker. Jessica Greenbaum's narrative poems, in which objects and metaphor share highest honors, attempt revelation through close observation of the everyday. Written in ""plain American that cats and dogs can read, "" as Marianne Moore phrased it, these contemporary lyrics bring forward the challenges of Wislawa Szymborska, the reportage of Yehuda Amichai, and the formal forays of Marilyn Hacker. The book asks at heart: how does life present itself to us, and how do we create value from
Cover; Contents; Acknowledgments; Next Door; Promised Town; House Phone; Anthology; What We Read Then; The First, Youngest Men; Seven, Seven, Seventy-Seven; The Voice of Peace; Houston in the Early Eighties; Without Measure; Stowaway's Ascent; One Key; Packing Slip; A Line from Jimi Hendrix Comes to Mind; Early April; "This" and "That"; When My Daughter Got Sick; Beauty's Rearrangements; What For is For; Before; Cosmic Page; A Poem for S.; Little White Truck; Sonnets for the Autobiographical Urban Dweller; Baldo's; Perfume's Journey; Little "the" Rules the World; Gardens, Passover
Streaming NancyThe Use of Metaphor; God; The Gold Standard; Marriage Made in Brooklyn; Gratitude's Anniversary; What to Expect; My Hands in Winter; Firefly; One Block from the Navy Yard; The Moment We Can't Stay; For You Today; No Ideas but in Things; The Two Yvonnes; Dedications
