Iain Haley Pollock’s poems cover the ground from a woman late to catfish supper to an ancient queen who howls, “Sea, you is ugly,” from the creaking of slave ships launched from Lancaster to gunfire on a contemporary Philadelphia street. Such lyric moments find grounding in stories woven through this book—in one story line, a boy with a black mother and white father wishes he could shed his white skin or carve into what lies beneath: “I flung my almost white self / into my mother’s embrace—that brown / embrace I hoped would swallow me whole / and spit back a boy four shades darker.” Another thread follows a marriage and a woman intertwined with hunger and the blues, a woman who hears a whale song in a refrigerator’s hum, who cries hard like the lonely barking of a fox.
Even when these poems soften, they can’t be complacent about good fortune: for all the maple seedpods and snow fluttering down here, the poems are always aware of wreckage and car bombs there, and they keep conscious of the mustard gas of old wars and the losses of recent ones. Punctuated with lives that end early, such as those of Hart Crane and Mikey Clark, a high-school classmate who once swiped the Communion wine, Pollock’s collection earns its vitality and romance without closing its eyes to violence and sorrow.
IAIN HALEY POLLOCK lives in Philadelphia and teaches English at Chestnut Hill Academy. His work has appeared in publications including AGNI, American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Callaloo, Drunken Boat, and Indiana Review.
IAIN HALEY POLLOCK lives in Philadelphia and teaches English at Chestnut Hill Academy. His work has appeared in publications including AGNI, American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Callaloo, Drunken Boat, and Indiana Review.
Table of Contents
Foreword, by Elizabeth Alexander
Rattla cain't hold me Port of Origin: Lancaster The Recessive Gene Hart Crane as Jim Crow At River Rock Farm Chorus of X, the Rescuers' Mark upon irremediable shores, those who never had time The Frog Child of the Sun Second Line Longing as Hoppin John Oya in Old City Hard Bop for Poor Boy Killadelphia The Lieutenant, Returned Snow in Wartime On the Porch, Almost Men Medusa of Libya Flight Confirmation King Biscuit Time Appalachia My Stove's in Good Condition Black Irish Shot & Killed BLUE NOTE 53428 Burn Pile and your young men shall see visions . . . Queen of the Lower Ninth Northbound Camphor The Diaspora Remembers Guantánamo Eastern State Penitentiary Looking Glass is dead. The school-march, each day's festival Whale Song Like a Blind Boy Jumping from Shed to Shed (So Tired of Standing Still We Got to) Move On Migratory Habits Vertical Hold, 1967 Affection Ne Me Quitte Pas Spring & the Catkins Beth David Cemetery, Long Island
