Floating City: Poems

by Anne Pierson Wiese

Overview

Anne Pierson Wiese's first collection of poems illuminates the everyday and the lessons to be learned amid life's routines. The poems in Floating City might be called poetry of place. Many are set in New York City, but they simultaneously inhabit a realm in which a mundane physical location or daily exchange can be seen to have human significance beyond the immediate. When one dismisses from one's mind the idea that going to the park, doing the laundry, buying a sandwich, and riding the subway are familiar experiences, one makes room for the actual to ally with the hypothetical by means of the emotions. The result, Wiese eloquently shows, is a form of truth that is silently generated whenever human beings earnestly endeavor to absorb the world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807165164
Publisher:	Louisiana State University Press
Publication date:	04/01/2004
Series:	Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	72
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Anne Pierson Wiese was born in Minneapolis and raised in Brooklyn. She was the recipient of the 2004 "Discovery"/The Nation Poetry Prize and a 2005 New York Foundation for the Arts Poetry Fellowship. Her poems have appeared in numerous publications, including The Nation, Southwest Review, Prairie Schooner, Raritan, Carolina Quarterly, and others. She currently resides with her husband in New York City.

Read an Excerpt

The century plant's flowered spear appears
only once, twenty feet tall, shortly before
its death. Given the proper conditions, all plants
bloom on schedule. We are less sure
of ourselves, the conditions we make
for presenting what's inside us
to the world less specific; we are haunted
by unplantlike doubts about the worth
of what we have to offer. The Botanic
Garden had advertised the event. I don't
remember how old I was, maybe ten.
There was a once-in-a-lifetime line
in the conservatory, a familiar smell
of growth and decay, the choice to look or look away.

“The Century Plant” published in Floating City by Anne Pierson Wiese
Copyright © 2007 by Anne Pierson Wiese. All rights reserved.

Table of Contents

In the Garden
Profile of the Night Heron     3
The Century Plant     4
Mica Schist     5
All Night Long     6
Lilacs     7
Undergrowth     8
In the Garden     9
Sonnet to Basil     10
Ficus Noire     11
Spring Planting     12
Peony     14
Hermit Coming Out of the Forest     15
Rabid     16
In the garden at the time of the evening breeze     18
Last Night in Brooklyn
In the Beginning     21
The Taking     22
Casa Rosa     23
Silver Palace     24
Last Night in Brooklyn     25
Sugar Hill, Harlem     26
Where We Live     27
Death Has No Place     28
Airborne     29
At the Laundromat     30
At the Farmer's Market     31
The Great Roberto     32
The Weather in New York     33
Thanksgiving     34
Leaving Brooklyn Heights     36
Columbus Park     37
Early Bird     38
Gift Basket for a Madman     39
EveningRush     40
Tell Me     41
A Pole, a Fence, a Bridge     42
Body Elite     43
The Hungarian Pastry Shop & Cafe     44
Everything but God     45
Historic New York Pub Still Flourishing     46
Harvest     47
How We Memorize     48
Bicentennial     49
Composed upon Brooklyn Bridge, July 6, 2003     50
Wind Farm
Season's Greetings from South Dakota     53
Water Bug     54
Inside     55
Farmers     56
Wind Farm     57
Tante Ethel in the Willow     58
You Are Here     59
Beiderbecke, Leon Bismarck "Bix," 1903-1931     60
Needle and Thread     61
On Learning to Go Limp in Public Places     62
Coming into Sioux Falls, South Dakota, in a Propeller Plane     63
Van Gogh's Sunflowers     64
Discovery     65
The Distance     66