Nostalgia for a World Where We Can Live

by Monica Berlin

Overview

Monica Berlin’s Nostalgia for a World Where We Can Live resides at the turbulent confluence of relentless news cycles and the repeated rending of our interior lives. In Berlin’s poetry sorrow makes its own landscape—solitary, intimate, forward-looking. Whether we attempt to traverse it or choose bypass, her poems show us where we live, how we carry on.

These poems notice the day in the wind, the night tucked up to the train tracks, and a slipping-in of yesterday, memory-laden, alongside the promise of a more hopeful tomorrow. Here is the Midwest, vibrant and relic, in the ongoing years of collapse and recovery. Here the constant companionship of weather lays claim to its own field of vision. Here, too, devastation: what’s left after. Berlin reminds us we are at the mercy of rivers, oceans, earth, wind, rain, blizzard, drought, and each other. “Maybe what I mean / to say is that I’ve come to see all the names we might / recognize destruction by,” Berlin’s speaker discovers. “We might / sometimes, stupidly, call it love.”

On her familiar prairie of lyricism and tumult, beauty and ruin, Berlin’s poems insist, plead, and seek to reassure. In a collection both mournful and urgent, both a “little book of days” and a song, this poet meditates on loss, wonder, and always the consolations of language. 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780809336845
Publisher:	Southern Illinois University Press
Publication date:	10/11/2018
Series:	Crab Orchard Series in Poetry
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	74
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Monica Berlin is a professor of English at Knox College in Illinois. She is the coauthor, with Beth Marzoni, of No Shape Bends the River So Long, winner of the 2013 New Measure Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in many journals, including Kenyon Review, Cincinnati Review, Colorado Review, TheJournal,Ecotone, and Diagram.


 

Read an Excerpt

THE DARK FLURRY OF ANOTHER MORNING PURRED

up to my neck, the light just coming on, another

day's tiny disasters waiting to knock against us,
to knock us over. In beds we're most reminded

of our smallness, coming in & out of sleep
to the sound of the scraping plow, the garbage truck's

heaving, a wail of sirens. Once, curled up & sheltering
against that raining city in an oversized hotel room,

I watched dancers in their studio blocks away,
their pirouettes, their pliés. Even at a distance

how unbearable that grace, how clumsy we are
even not moving. & this, what's most

worried the finish from: our own
proportions to the rest of the things

in our way. I'm not saying we spend our whole lives
palm-scraping slick cement, or tumbling down,

or cornering the bed's frame, although these days-
rough-shinned, bruised-up-& now winter

refusing to ease. In this brisk, want: something
handheld, manageable; my body, held tight;

a month pocket-sized, like summer
in a jar; like my once-small

speck of a boy before he really was,
like miniature, like nearly invisible; snow like

someone's idea of snow, some dream of snow.


TODAY, THREE FLIGHTS UP, WITH MY WHOLE BODY, I LIFTED

the glass pane, floor to near-ceiling high, sealed for a decade,
& when trying to place the rusty screen, the wind carried it out,

away, all those stories down. Between falling objects & this first
spring afternoon light, I read a tiny book whose title we can't say

because we don't distinguish it from what came just before,
that September date turned pale. All the while, I kept

picking up the phone to ring your house, where you weren't,
to tell my friend, who also wasn't, who's burning it down

one drape at a time-in your absence or because of it-how
suddenly I was what's burning, this raging in me. Ruin fingers

its way into everything. On the stairs, where I'd rushed
to be sure no injuries were sustained by the falling, I ran

into a boy I know & led him away to speak of stars, which,
he said, are failing him. I almost took his hand.


BY ROTE THE BODY LEARNS NEARLY EVERYTHING, AFTER

all. Not by touch. Not even muscle memory. In this town smalled
by proximity to water, slowed by distance to shoreline or tide,
where I've been now longer than I've been anywhere, I've taken
to retraining my body the routes disrupted. Even traffic
patterns-what light, what sign, what turn-only lane-broken.
For months that underpass closed, that overpass going up, &
now another fire, one that guts a half block where once a boy I
loved climbed through a window to open a door for me to walk
through & we knelt together in a kind of light I've spent years
trying to replicate-the closest to holy I've known-& these days,
it's all going up again, closed down again, blocked off or rerouted,
& getting lost to find new ways out is another
complication on an already indecipherably creased map, one
I never thought I'd need to untuck from where it was folded all
those years ago. Which is to say every street I turn down detours.
Which is really to say these days there's no other choice. Which is
to say the more beautiful the building the more flammable.
Which is to say the more delicate the thing the easier it's gone.


WHEN MORNING WAS ALMOST UNRECOGNIZABLE AS MORNING

& the light diffused by a fog so unwinter-like we couldn't
say with certainty that this was even something close to some

variation, we thought what time had become was something
suspended, something halted like the season itself, held small

in our palms or tucked in a pocket, forgotten & then
washed, that kind of, which is not really at all but

omission-the morning an elision, winter elided, our bodies
knowing only the thin rubbings erasers leave behind. That that

morning undone by light was something far short of miracle,
we are learning this year to winter here means let it go-.

Means even this gauzy sky will betray. Means even our hearts
here, where the horizon goes on & on, will turn to look toward

where-in another year there'd be only white, endless for miles-
the fields are stripped bare, stilled & waiting, kept waiting.
 

Table of Contents

CONTENTS

Nostalgia for a World Where We Can Live 1

What a year looks like: drenched. So soggy here. So much
No apples on the apple tree this summer, & if there were
Another late summer early quiet blue-skied morning, my son
On either end of this year, on either end of every goddamn year,
When we turn the calendar's page, my little boy looking
The dark flurry of another morning purred
This afternoon the sky's making the kind of promises it can
Days the hours are no more fact than the unbelievable
Sometimes being here is like
To scale, yes, days to scale, even when they grow so cluttered
Just before the blood draw the other morning, I filled in small

We loved the rush hour most, the cars suit-filled, briefcase-heavy,
Today, three flights up, with my whole body, I lifted
Some disasters are given names, others called after
The truth is I have trouble forgiving most things, although I've never minded
By rote the body learns nearly everything, after
It's true. There are places we'd rather be
Not quite another season, but almost, & on the window ledges,
How I wish more things I read I misread, like the bodies in the mine
Because you're still in another time zone disparate things
The problem is the revolving door, this
Because I wasn't thinking peninsula
If there's a joke more complicated than "knock-knock," more
Too lazy to lip-read in noisy rooms, the other night
A kind of stutter, that over &
Down the hall the accordion man turns into a door
Long before the horse pulls up lame there is the matter

Back to this wind, up against it even,
The linens soften, now threadbare, just as I'm waking, small, in this
When morning was almost unrecognizable as morning
What the wind kicks up, what the waters trouble, even
The forecast's calling for flurries tomorrow, & worry
At the new year, in the dark, I watched time
The lesson tonight nothing less than
In this, this snow-brightened light of a near-spring morning, I think of his glass
How quickly the body, when asked, forgets
Stay mouthed through
How quiet every end when it comes, briefest glimpse of a future
If all the love we'll know is the kind of love
Because all day the sky held back
Not only the night

Notes
Acknowledgments

Editorial Reviews

These are poems to keep close, to hold in case of emergency. When we are brought to our knees—whether by ruin or by grace, by the news or by the day’s little disasters, or by our own foolish hearts—Berlin’s Nostalgia for a World Where We Can Live, all big-mouthed love and patient tending—to sorrow, to memory, to language—abides.”—Beth Marzoni, coauthor of No Shape Bends the River So Long

“To read Monica Berlin’s Nostalgia for a World Where We Can Liveis to reexamine the world we know through adversity and loss instead of a pair of eyes—everything is more intricate, everything is that much more concentrated and unbelievable in the memoried spaces of these precise, elegant poems. Nostalgia suggests longing, but these poems create new, unexplored experiences from what we understand of memory’s bigger insistences: tributaries of recollections and gestures that remind us that where we are now is almost as important as where we’ve been. In these poems, every tiny detail is part of the larger circumstance of human need. Each remembrance spins like a song from a lost record while Berlin lets us hear everything—the immaculate static, the rippling grooves of want, and the unavoidable fulfillment that follows.”—Adrian Matejka, author of Map to the Starsand The Big Smoke
 
“I still remember, vividly, the first time I encountered a Monica Berlin poem. I could not stop talking about it, much less forget it: the abundance and intelligence in its lines, its psychologically-charged attention to Midwestern landscape, its unswerving outward gaze, and ultimately the poet's fierce and admirable heart. I loved reading every page of this book.”—Katrina Vandenberg, author of The Alphabet Not Unlike the Worldand Atlas
“This book asks essential questions about the world we live in, a world defined by disaster, in which the speaker finds herself ‘stunned silent or stunned angry / or just stunned.’ There is a beloved child, who a mother realizes will ‘go on without us.’ There is a dead father who haunts every landscape. Most of all, there is the news—towns are swallowed by floods, levees are breached, cities burned, and earthquakes wreck the earth. And yet there is not only grief but vivid joy. This is a book about how to navigate a life and how to raise a child in a world that is both brutal and beautiful.”—Nicole Cooley, author of On Marriageand Breach
 

From the Publisher