Sylph: Poems
In her first collection of poems, Abigail Cloud draws inspiration from nineteenth-century European Romantic ballets, which often portrayed scorned females as mystical spirits such as sylphs, shades, and wilis. Some of these creatures seduced men into dancing until they died — punishment for inconstancy or lured them into love. For Cloud, the dark gravity that holds these enchanters to the earth is the same as our own and thus these demons are as everyday as air.
Sylph filters our world through the lenses of dance, folklore, and history, revealing our contemporary lives to be dreamlike and prismatic. "In the blink the mouse spent to disappear, I loved you," avows the sylph. The cost of her ascension — and ours — is steep: "our price speech, our forgetting breath." Such are the stakes in this complex, seductive, and stunning debut.

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Sylph: Poems
In her first collection of poems, Abigail Cloud draws inspiration from nineteenth-century European Romantic ballets, which often portrayed scorned females as mystical spirits such as sylphs, shades, and wilis. Some of these creatures seduced men into dancing until they died — punishment for inconstancy or lured them into love. For Cloud, the dark gravity that holds these enchanters to the earth is the same as our own and thus these demons are as everyday as air.
Sylph filters our world through the lenses of dance, folklore, and history, revealing our contemporary lives to be dreamlike and prismatic. "In the blink the mouse spent to disappear, I loved you," avows the sylph. The cost of her ascension — and ours — is steep: "our price speech, our forgetting breath." Such are the stakes in this complex, seductive, and stunning debut.

17.95 In Stock
Sylph: Poems

Sylph: Poems

by Abigail Cloud
Sylph: Poems

Sylph: Poems

by Abigail Cloud

Paperback

$17.95 
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Overview

In her first collection of poems, Abigail Cloud draws inspiration from nineteenth-century European Romantic ballets, which often portrayed scorned females as mystical spirits such as sylphs, shades, and wilis. Some of these creatures seduced men into dancing until they died — punishment for inconstancy or lured them into love. For Cloud, the dark gravity that holds these enchanters to the earth is the same as our own and thus these demons are as everyday as air.
Sylph filters our world through the lenses of dance, folklore, and history, revealing our contemporary lives to be dreamlike and prismatic. "In the blink the mouse spent to disappear, I loved you," avows the sylph. The cost of her ascension — and ours — is steep: "our price speech, our forgetting breath." Such are the stakes in this complex, seductive, and stunning debut.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780807156933
Publisher: Pleiades Press
Publication date: 04/07/2014
Series: Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Series Award
Pages: 88
Product dimensions: 8.90(w) x 5.90(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Poems by ABIGAIL CLOUD have appeared widely in journals such as Black Warrior Review, The Cincinnati Review, Copper Nickel, The Gettysburg Review, and Quarterly West. Cloud is on the faculty at Bowling Green State University, where she is editor-in-chief of Mid-American Review.

Table of Contents

Prologue

White Night Demon 3

The Birth of the Everyday Demon 4

Needle Prick Demon 5

Broken Jar Demon 6

The Demon of Untraceable Scents 7

Lost Wedding Ring Demon 8

The Christening 9

The Girl with Enamel Eyes 10

Before the Glass Slipper 11

From the Compendium of Old Madge 12

The Black Act

James Pursues 17

Siegfried is full of improbable vows 18

Cicada Killer #2: Soldier 19

Earth Star 20

Tryst 21

In Which Angel Goes on a Bender 22

Bonnie Parker, After the Second Heist 23

Ginger, at 3 a.m. 24

Ginger's Stylist Tells All 25

Nights at the Moulin 26

Spider 27

Mattress Fire Demon 28

Snapped Key Demon 29

The Everyday Demon Experiences Burn-Out 30

The Demon of Unlucky Strikes 31

Outside the Glass Factory, Murano 32

Cimitero di San Michele, Diaghilev's Grave 33

Dancer's Poem for Calks 34

Postcards for My Mother, Galleria Borghese 35

Mad Scene 37

The White Act

Myrtha's Woods 41

Wili 42

The Ptarmigan 43

Cicada Killer #3: Matriarch 44

After Failure 45

Water at the Lunatic Ball 46

Library 47

Bones 48

Lunatic Notes, 1838 49

The Crib, 1864, Utica Asylum 50

Letter to a Suicidal Man 51

To a husband and son lost in fog 52

Choked Peppermint Demon 53

Blue Birth Demon 55

The Demon of Hidden Birds 56

Swan Aubade 57

Apothéose

Bayadère 61

Husbandry 62

Shades 64

Cicada Killer #1 65

The Ox and the Waterfall 66

Blind Woman Walks Barefoot in Rain 67

Potato 68

Thanksgiving 69

Sylphide 70

Burying 71

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