Lucky Fish

by Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Overview

Poetry. Asian American Studies. LUCKY FISH travels along a lush current—a confluence of leaping vocabulary and startling formal variety, with upwelling gratitude at its source: for love, motherhood, "new hope," and the fluid and rich possibilities of words themselves. With an exuberant appetite for "my morning song, my scurry-step, my dew," anchored in complicated human situations, this astounding young poet's third collection of poems is her strongest yet.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781932195583
Publisher:	Tupelo Press
Publication date:	01/15/2011
Pages:	78
Sales rank:	203,268
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.21(d)

About the Author

Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the author of LUCKY FISH (2011); AT THE DRIVE-IN VOLCANO (2007), winner of the Balcones Prize; and MIRACLE FRUIT (2003), winner of the Tupelo Press Prize, the ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Award in poetry, and the Global Filipino Award. Her poetry and essays have been widely anthologized and have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Black Warrior Review, FIELD, Mid-American Review, and Tin House. Aimee was awarded a 2009 fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, has twice served as a faculty member at the Kundiman retreat for Asian-American writers and has given readings and workshops from Amsterdam to San Francisco. She is associate professor of English at State University of New York-Fredonia, where she is a recipient of the campus-wide Hagan Young Scholar Award and the SUNY Chancellor's Medal for Scholarly and Creative Activities. She lives with her husband and two young sons.

Table of Contents

CONTENTS
ONE
A Globe is Just an Asterisk

The Secret of Soil 3
A Globe is lustan Asterisk and Every Home Should Have an Asterisk 4
Kansas Animalia 6
Fortune-Telling Parrot 7
Letter Found at the Tower of Silence 8
Four Amulets for a Frightened Farmer 9
Corpse Flower 10
Paper Person 11
A Natural History of the Color Red 12
The Feathered Cape of Kechi (a fable) 14
At Hundred Islands National Park, I Count Only One Island 16
Kottayam Morning I7
If You Find Yourself on a Houseboat I8
At the Center for Retired Great Apes 19
Pie Plate 21
The Soils I Have Eaten 22

TWO
Sweet Tooth

TWELVE / TWELVE / TWELVE 25
Inside a Diorama 27
Mosquitoes 29
::{ concerning snake hips }:: 30
Reptilian's Lament 32
The Mascot of Beavercreek High Breaks Her Silence 33
How to Be a Poet 34
Suppose You Were a Moray Eel 35
Bibliomancy 36
Fruit Thievery: A Lament 37
Last Summer of Singledom 38
Thanksgiving 39
Sweet Tooth 40
Baked Goods 41
Suppose You Chopped Down a Mulberry Tree 43
FOOSH 44
Dear Amy Nehzooukammyatootill, 45
Are All the Break-Ups in Your Poems Real? 46
Dear Betty Brown, 47
The Ghost-Fish Postcards 48

THREE
Lucky Penny

Hedgehog 53
Notes for the Heartbeat at My Feet 54
Birth Geographic 55
Under the Pascal Moon 60
Toy Universe 61
The Light I Collect 62
Lobison Song 64
Come Home, Come Home 65
Memorial Day Derecho 66
Eclipse 67
Waiting for Him to Speak 68
The Sick Diet 70
Two Egg, Florida 71
Inside the Happiness Factory 72
The Latch 73
Rain: A Catalog 74
Lucky Penny 75

Acknowledgments 78

Editorial Reviews

Nezhukumatathil's fourth book is fascinated with the small mechanisms of being, whether natural, personal, or imagined. Everything from eating eels in the Ozark mountains to the history of red dye finds a rich life in her poems. At times her lush settings and small stories are reminiscent of fairy tales ("The frog who wanted to see the sea was mostly disappointed"), while at others Nezhukumatathil (At the Drive-In Volcano) speaks with resonance and fierceness: "The center of my hands boiled/ with blossoms when we made a family. I would never flee that garden. I swear to/ you here and now: If I ever go missing, know that I am trying to come home." Even as the poems jump from the Philippines to India to New York, they still take their time, stopping to notice that "there is no mystery on water/ greater than the absence of rust," and to draw small but wonderful parallels: "I loved you dark & late. The crocus have found ways to push up & say this/ too." (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

Aimee Nezhukumatathil was born in Chicago to a Filipina mother and a South Indian father, and those cultural strands are woven into the DNA of her strange, lush, but oh-so-American poems.
—The New York Times

Dana Jennings