Human Hours

by Catherine Barnett

Overview

Winner of the Believer Book Award

The triumphant follow-up collection to The Game of Boxes, winner of the James Laughlin Award

Catherine Barnett’s tragicomic third collection, Human Hours, shuttles between a Whitmanian embrace of others and a kind of rapacious solitude. Barnett speaks from the middle of hope and confusion, carrying philosophy into the everyday. Watching a son become a young man, a father become a restless beloved shell, and a country betray its democratic ideals, the speakers try to make sense of such departures. Four lyric essays investigate the essential urge and appeal of questions that are “accursed,” that are limited—and unanswered—by answers. What are we to do with the endangered human hours that remain to us? Across the leaps and swerves of this collection, the fevered mind tries to slow—or at least measure—time with quiet bravura: by counting a lover’s breaths; by remembering a father’s space-age watch; by envisioning the apocalyptic future while bedding down on a hard, cold floor, head resting on a dictionary. Human Hours pulses with the absurd, with humor that accompanies the precariousness of the human condition.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781555978143
Publisher:	Graywolf Press
Publication date:	09/04/2018
Pages:	80
Sales rank:	751,361
Product dimensions:	6.49(w) x 9.05(h) x 0.34(d)

About the Author

Catherine Barnett is the author of Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced and The Game of Boxes. She has received a Whiting Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She lives in New York City.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

The Amenities
Accursed Questions, i

A doctor suggested I spend four minutes a day asking questions about whatever matters most to me.

Four minutes, that's how long it takes to boil an egg, get from 96th to 42nd on the express train, initiate an irreversible apocalypse.

* * *

How do I get out of here? is the question my father asks most frequently. It takes him three or four seconds to say the seven syllables, there are frequent glitches in his speech but it's a perfect mantra.

What next? and Jackie? are his other inquiries.

Jackie what next Jackie what next Jackie —

If you count repetitions, they add up to at least four minutes.

* * *

At dinner I asked my mother which wh-question she'd keep if she could use only one, and she said why.

I remember when she first told me she reads the obits to see how old people are when they die. A young man was recently in love with her, but she stayed loyal to my father, who's lost his memory. He doesn't ask who we are but often he wonders if we have something to do with him. Oh that's grand, he says when I explain who I am to him, and he to me.

* * *

Each time I read He will never ride the red horse she describes I feel sad until I remember the red horse is the sun, the same sun that will rise too soon tomorrow morning right here over my left shoulder.

My son is sleeping on the couch with all the lights on. Nothing bad can happen.

How long does it take? he says in his sleep.

* * *

Lying together a friend and I tried just to speak in questions. It was as intimate a way of passing time as any, except sex, I think. He asked why I have two empty glass bowls on the bookshelf. I didn't answer because I was only listening.

When my son was little, they were filled with Halloween candy.

* * *

What is an ending? the students sometimes ask. Ah, the answer to that question brings the priest and the doctor running over the hills.

* * *

Maybe best not to ask when will what take whom where and to do what. Jean once told me she's not interested in writing about getting older but about getting dead. In Lucy, she speaks directly to the oldest and most complete human ancestor. There is no boundary between the living and the dead:

Or what do you do now Lucy

for love? Your eye-holes.

Those of us who are scared just chronicle the slow path. The scar where they pulled my son from me is starting to sag now, etc., etc.

Turns out when is a question children learn late, after where, what, and who. Why is perhaps the latest, and it can go on incessantly.

Why and when and where and what all go back to the root who.

Lately I've been walking around talking to myself, who is full of swearing and disbelief.

* * *

Without much hope I opened my first small bottle of 3-in-One oil and applied it to the hinges of my front door that apparently keep my neighbor up at night. Squirting the oil on the wildly overpainted hinge was like throwing seeds on a blacktop and expecting a garden. But it worked, and that cheered me up.

Imagine if Augustine had been addressing 3-in-One oil instead of God:

Do the heaven and earth then contain Thee, since Thou fillest them? or dost Thou fill them and yet overflow, since they do not contain Thee? And whither, when the heaven and the earth are filled, pourest Thou forth the remainder of Thyself? ... Oh! that Thou wouldest enter into my heart, and inebriate it, that I may forget my ills, and embrace Thee, my sole good!

* * *

Can't we let him sleep all winter?

He wants to be set free. He wants to be set free upon the waters.

So much depends upon the kindness of questions. And the questions we cannot not speak of.

* * *

The radio is playing "Blowin' in the Wind," which was one of the first songs I learned on the guitar. At the age of ten, I couldn't get enough of the questions. I played it for anyone who'd listen, I played it in my nightgown, in my hand-me-down red Speedo, in my mother's sunglasses, in the reflection in my father's martini glass. I got so good at it I could play it while balancing on a bongo board in the middle of the living room. I got so good at it I can still feel the precariousness underfoot.

Appeal to Numbers

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Human Hours"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Catherine Barnett.
Excerpted by permission of Graywolf Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

The Amenities 5

♦

En Route 9

An Apprehension 10

The Light from across the Fields 13

The Skin of the Face Is That Which Stays Most Naked, Most Destitute 14

Forensics 15

Epistemology 17

Still Life 18

Landscape with Borrowed Contours 19

Lyric and Narrative Time at Café Loup 20

♦

Accursed Questions, i 23

♦

Appeal to Numbers 29

Comic Morning 30

Idée Fixe 31

Essay on An Essay Concerning Human Understanding 32

Son in August 34

Lore 36

The Necessary Preoccupations 37

The Art of the Security Question 38

O Esperanza! 39

♦

Accursed Questions, ii 43

♦

The Humanities 49

Calamity Jane on Etsy after the 2016 Election 51

Another Divine Comedy 53

Let Facts Be Submitted to a Candid World 54

Metaphor on the Crosstown 55

Summons 56

The Sky Flashes 59

Origin Story 61

Central Park 63

♦

Accursed Questions, iii 67

♦

Pain Scale 73

In the Studio at End of Day 74

433 Eros 76

Uncertainty Principle at the Atrium Bar 77

Uncertainty Principle at Dawn 79

Beckett on the Jumbotron 80

Prayer for the Lost among Us 82

The Material World 85

Eternal Recurrence 86

♦

Accursed Questions, iv 89

♦

Amor Fati 95

Editorial Reviews

★ 07/16/2018
Barnett (The Game of Boxes) ponders “the silvery green light of time” in her elegantly understated third collection. According to Barnett, time is more than a phenomenon to be sorted into a “packet of minutes”; rather, it’s the “hours making things/ that matter to no one.” The title evokes both quietly quotidian passages as well as mechanized schedules, while echoing a more common unit with which pet owners are familiar: dog years. Barnett presses readers to consider concepts of time as though through the eyes of another species when observing how humans age and confront mortality. “Maybe best not to ask when will what take whom where and to do what,” she writes. Yet Barnett’s queries, each more revealing and surprising than the last, compose the backbone of this collection: “Are sex and death the only rafts out of here?” She also reveals the ravages of time through portraits of her father. “When I look at him now/ I see all of the fathers/ he’s been—/ a funhouse mirror of fathers./ It’s not a tragedy, my friend tells me,/ and she’s right.” Barnett claims that she’d “like to feel a little less, know a little more,” but the emotional depth and observational nuance of these poems is something to behold. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

A fast-paced but unflappable tour of hotels, airports, college drop-offs, gynecologists’ offices and the cafes of Lower Manhattan. . . . The moments of stillness in Human Hours are equally compelling.”—The New York Times Book Review

“[Human Hours] brim[s] with emotional intelligence.”—The New York Times Style Magazine

“Barnett’s marvelous third collection is populated by devastatingly wry (and wryly devastating) poems about aging, time, and the existential predicaments—violence, trauma, consciousness itself. . . . Iconoclastic and penetrating, the speaker of these poems unsettles and enlivens.”—Vulture

“[Human Hours] unspools in a conversational, free-associative idiom. . . . Even in our darkest hours, the poems insist, company and comedy are never far away.”—BOMB.com

“[Catherine Barnett’s] new poems, collected in Human Hours, display a new and beautifully-feathered sense of doubt. They say in the kindest way that doubt, in its best form, can be a way of knowing. . . . Watching each of these poems dive after a target and swerve away is simply breathtaking.”—John Freeman, Literary Hub

“A book-long meditation on time marked by vigorous inquiry. . . . Barnett’s interrogations are unrelenting, occasionally riddles, like koans, posed in response to life’s challenges. . . . But there is a constant search for answers, through an interrogation of the everyday.”—American Poets

“Barnett’s style is conversational, convivial. . . . The poems in Human Hours both disrupt time and hold it in place.”—Ploughshares

“[Barnett] thread[s] in little lines of soaring lyric grace, laying them comfortably alongside mundane concerns.”—On the Seawall

“Elegantly understated. . . . The emotional depth and observational nuance of these poems is something to behold.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review

“These unforgettable poems, interrogating a singular life so precisely, draw us into the precarious nature of being human.”—Claudia Rankine

“Barnett uses her extraordinary poetic skills not simply to manage her not-knowing but to unleash it. . . . These poems are elixir, and they burn.”—Mary Szybist

From the Publisher