Because a Fire in Our Heads: Poems

by Jay Udall

Overview

These poems explore desire in its many forms—sensual, emotional, intellectual, aesthetic, and spiritual—confronting an infinite cosmos, existential separateness and vulnerability, violence, injustice, and death. This book enacts a running conversation with American cultural history, neuroscience, particle physics, religion, baseball, zoology, other poems and poets, jazz, blues, and zydeco, ranging through time and across New Mexico, Nevada, Louisiana, Virginia, and points in between and beyond. 
... 
The Oracle at Amarillo

Find the motel laundry room,
the one windowsill
smudged with ash and charred butts,
coffee stains and feedlot dust.

Listen through highway sighs,
gazing at the empty parking lot,
the fence shedding its brown paint,
and what’s left of the sky.

All questions will be answered.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781680031515
Publisher:	Texas Review Press
Publication date:	01/25/2023
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	90
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

JAY UDALL is the author of five previous books of poetry, including The Welcome Table, winner of the New Mexico Book Award. He teaches at Nicholls State University in Thibodaux, Louisiana, where he also serves as poet-in-residence.

Table of Contents

1. Because a Fire in Our Heads
   • The Well Room
   • Because a Fire in Our Heads
   • Accompaniment
   • Fledgling
   • Timed Drive
   • Tools of the Trade
   • The Hidden Grave
   • Seen
   • A Certain Confusion
   • Camerado
   • Lick and Stroke
   • Head Massage
   • Outside
   • Extreme Home Makeover
2. Blessings of the Beasts
   • The Following Tiger
   • Blessing of the Beasts
   • Door in the Stone
   • The Rule of Attraction
   • Love Bugs
   • Embodied
   • Passengers
   • Before the Harvest
   • Snakes and Tortoise
   • To Feed the Feral
   • To an Armadillo
   • Sleeping with the Snake
   • Lost Feather, Little Wing
   • Showing Forth
   • The Gathering
3. Leave-Taking
   • Before Leaving
   • Shhhh
   • Company
   • Leave-Taking
   • Reading Blind
   • Grief Songs
   • For the Making
   • Anonymous
   • The Further Definition
   • Who Travels in the Ground
4. Traveling Here
   • Sometimes a Bridge
   • Exodus
   • Rest Area (No Facilities)
   • Passage
   • Traveling Here
   • The Oracle at Amarillo
   • I Slip on a Pair of Water Moccasins
   • Strike and Harvest
   • Jesus Walks in Blue above Louisiana
   • In Isolation
   • Personal
   • Louisiana 1 South in Winter
   • Sister in Silence and Vacant Wind
   • After the Chauvin Sculpture Garden
   • Standby
5. What Returns
   • Meteor Shower
   • What Returns
   • After the Murder of an Old Friend
   • A Faltering Shelter
   • The Witness under Cross Examination
   • The Dirt Speaks
   • Leaf
   • Where It Begins
   • Void
   • Skinned
   • Night Rises, Sleeping
   • Walking Home

• Notes
• Dedication and Thanks
• About the Author

What People are Saying About This

Darrell Bourque

"Because a Fire in Our Heads is sublime revelation, a book of place poems set in 'this house whose walls we've never found.' Memory lives in this house, and love, and caverns of grief, as well as dislocation, and war, and death, and the terrible beauty of human passage. Jay Udall's poems are lighted throughout by 'thick profusions' that might have 'startled the air in spring.' The book is a triumph." —Darrell Bourque, former Louisiana Poet Laureate and author of Where I Waited

Alicia Ostriker

"Jay Udall has composed a book haunted by violence, killing, war, and nature's own disasters, daring us not to look away, yet also offering at our most sunken depths 'a buoyancy from nowhere / lifting, some gravity pulling up.' Amid 'skin, scale, fur / and feather,' through dirt and sky, although our species is 'the kind who murder our own in schools and churches,' Udall teaches us to love and praise creation: 'the living work, the thick and quick of it.' I am grateful for the precision and tenderness of this poet." —Alicia Ostriker, author of Waiting for the Light
 

Editorial Reviews

"Jay Udall has composed a book haunted by violence, killing, war, and nature's own disasters, daring us not to look away, yet also offering at our most sunken depths 'a buoyancy from nowhere / lifting, some gravity pulling up.' Amid 'skin, scale, fur / and feather,' through dirt and sky, although our species is 'the kind who murder our own in schools and churches,' Udall teaches us to love and praise creation: 'the living work, the thick and quick of it.' I am grateful for the precision and tenderness of this poet." —Alicia Ostriker, author of Waiting for the Light
 

"Because a Fire in Our Heads is sublime revelation, a book of place poems set in 'this house whose walls we've never found.' Memory lives in this house, and love, and caverns of grief, as well as dislocation, and war, and death, and the terrible beauty of human passage. Jay Udall's poems are lighted throughout by 'thick profusions' that might have 'startled the air in spring.' The book is a triumph." —Darrell Bourque, former Louisiana Poet Laureate and author of Where I Waited

From the Publisher