Still Life

by Jay Hopler

Overview

Still Life has been named a best book of the year by NPR and Time magazine. Longlisted for the 2022 National Book Award.

Confronted with a terminal cancer diagnosis, Jay Hopler—author of the National Book Award-finalist The Abridged History of Rainfall—got to work. The result of that labor is Still Life, a collection of poems that are heartbreaking, terrifying, and deeply, darkly hilarious. In an attempt to find meaning in a life ending right before his eyes, Hopler squares off against monsters real and imagined, personal and historical, and tries not to flinch. This work is no elegy; it’s a testament to courage, love, compassion, and the fierceness of the human heart. It’s a violently funny but playfully serious fulfillment of what Arseny Tarkovsky called the fundamental purpose of art: a way to prepare for death, be it far in the future or very near at hand.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781952119675
Publisher:	McSweeney's Publishing
Publication date:	04/05/2022
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	63
File size:	612 KB

About the Author

Jay Hopler was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in 1970. He earned a BA in English and American Literature from New York University, an MA in Creative Writing from the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars, an MFA in Creative Writing from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and a PhD in American Studies from Purdue University. His first collection of poetry, Green Squall (2006), was chosen by Louise Glück as the winner of the Yale Younger Poets Prize; his second collection, The Abridged History of Rainfall (2016), was a finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry.

Hopler's poems take as their starting point a formal virtuosity rooted in idiosyncrasy, passion of vision, and the beautiful (sometimes not-so-beautiful) violence of emotion. They are by turns plainspoken, erudite, opaque, clear, serious, and broodingly funny. Hopler is a dexterous poet, but never dogmatic. His poems make sense but not points; they think and reel and describe the broken world, without a wasted word. What the likes of G.M. Hopkins and Wallace Stevens and Robert Hayden carried out, Jay Hopler continues and expands upon, to gorgeous effect.

According to poet Katie Ford, “Hopler’s vision and voice [are] both painfully complex because of how much of the world he allows to attach to him, to stake its claim on him.”

Hopler is also an editor and translator. His works include The Killing Spirit: An Anthology of Murder for Hire (1998), Before the Door of God: An Anthology of Devotional Poetry (edited with his spouse, poet and Renaissance scholar Kimberly Johnson, 2013), and The Museum of Small Dark Things: 25 Poems by Georg Trakl (2016). The recipient of numerous honors and awards, including a Fellowship from the Lannan Foundation, a Whiting Award, the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award, two National “Best Books” Award from USA Book News, two Florida Book Awards, a Foreword Reviews Book-of-the-Year Award, and the Rome Prize in Literature, Hopler directs the program in creative writing at the University of South Florida.

Table of Contents

Upon Learning that I Am the 51^st Most-Famous Person from Puerto Rico 1

Chapter 1

Radiation Vault 4 4

Meditation on My Cancer 5

Self-portrait not looking 6

Story problem 7

Still life w/ hands 9

After the diagnosis: meditation on the origins of "death's thin melody too (variations on an escalator)" by paul rudy 10

Some Lights Go Out 11

Parade 12

The canonization 13

Reason for not moving 15

War comes to the island 16

The seawall 17

Still life w/ wet gems 18

Another afternoon 19

Imaginary photograph sunset mother's day davis islands florida 2020 20

The Sky Is Like the Sky in a Painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder 21

The Murder 23

The Trauma Sutra 24

Honky-Tonk Sonnet 25

Chapter 2

To My Wife on Our Anniversary 28

Swarm 29

The Church Gardens: A Walk 30

Love & the memory of it 31

Loom 32

Poem after a poem by césar vallejo w/ a nod to donald justice 33

Erasure 34

The Vacation Over 35

Chapter 3

Discarded Memoir Titles 38

Duck & Groundcover 40

Student evaluation of instruction: obituary edition 41

Appendix 42

Memento Mori 43

Requiem w/ Eye Roll 45

Benediction 46

Benediction 2 47

Meditation on the Italian Cinema 48

Still life w/ feet 49

Monster 50

Meditation on folklore: a coda 52

Family astrology 53

Markers 54

Obituary 57

Notes 59

Acknowledgments 61

About the Author 63

Editorial Reviews

A startling and darkly funny collection of sonnets, lyrics, epigrams and songs that produces a jolt of electric joy as the poet grapples with his end-of-life concerns and mortal fears.”
—Citation of the Pulitzer Prize nomination

“Hopler gestures toward the poetic tradition in formal lyrics, offers a satirical self-obituary, and even includes a musical score. It all adds up to a sturdy ship of death and a transcendent love song to life and to his wife: ‘it was she that lit the world.’”
—Craig Morgan Teicher, NPR

“In the wake of a terminal cancer diagnosis, poet Jay Hopler pondered his own mortality with wit, searing insight, and a clear-eyed sense of courage in his third and final poetry collection […] The collection is a bittersweet triumph. Hopler confronts his fears—big and small, real and imagined—in a magnificent demonstration of the strength of the heart”
—Cady Lang, Time

“People with advanced aggressive cancers automatically become authorities on mortality. Poets with such cancers have been dealt, at great cost, four aces. And for the wild ones, like Jay Hopler, cancer can be a field day. The bleak friskiness here is not new, nor is the swaggering rancor (like Berryman, who was also proud to be right in his dire predictions). What is new is gratitude: for the ‘atomic girl’ it is his extraordinary good fortune to meet and ultimately marry; for the opportunity of art, which lends to his passions’ duration. There is a difference, marked in these poems, between rage at the fact of mortality and rage at the diagnosis of its imminence. And the latter infuses Hopler’s extravagant jokes and glittering improvisations with the urgency and weight of last words.”
—Louise Glück, winner of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature

“Still Life is astonishing, a collection that faces up to the injustice of untimely death and discovers—not insulated from despair and rage but arrived at somehow *through* them—an extraordinary, difficult, electric joy. No book I have read in years has moved me so deeply; no book has felt so full of life.”
—Garth Greenwell, author of Cleanness and What Belongs to You

Praise for Jay Hopler

“By these poems, your faith will be shattered and restored, restored and wondrously shattered again.”
—Craig Morgan Teicher

“Hopler’s vision and voice, both painfully complex because of how much of the world he allows to attach to him, to stake its claim on him, teach us we are in the presence of lasting, inimitable poems. No one writes like Hopler. And no one ever will.”
—Katie Ford

From the Publisher