The Last Unkillable Thing

by Emily Pittinos

Overview

This collection holds a mirror to the self and in its reflection we find the elegiac and the ecological, as in “how much of enjoying a place / is destroying it?”; the worlds both domestic and natural, as in “when the redbird strikes the window, it is me / who takes blame”; a daughter shattered, but not without humor—“I can feel it coming on, my season of lavish suffering, the why me why me why me why me / that leaves me snowblind in the asking”—and, certainly, not without tenderness. Shaped by both concision and unfolding sequences, The Last Unkillable Thing is a journey across landscapes of mourning.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781609387648
Publisher:	University of Iowa Press
Publication date:	04/15/2021
Series:	Iowa Poetry Prize
Edition description:	1
Pages:	68
Product dimensions:	6.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Emily Pittinos is a Great Lakes poet and essayist currently teaching in Boise, Idaho. This is her first book of poems.

Read an Excerpt

From “Subnivean (or Holding Back the Year)”

I’d be lost

without my own bright footpath: tilled snow:

cloud cover: moonglow refracted: the shotgun crack

of a bough unburdened.

Could I walk off the hours

I’ve spent ashamed, attempting a life

that would make the dead proud?

What would it look like,
how much would it weigh?

Table of Contents

Assuming, once again, it's done with 1

*

Usual Ghosts 5

After 6

The Latest Tornado 12

Wanting a Child 13

Edge of Ruin 14

**

With Key in the Door 17

After 18

I Grow Less Visible 22

It Is Not Animal to Forgive 24

Trembling on the Skin of a Droplet 26

All in Dissolve 27

I Remember How Cold I Will Be 28

In Wolfs Clothing 30

Loss Becomes Me 31

The Days Shorter, and Yet 34

***

She Must Have a Bit of Green to Look At 37

****

Hot Spring: 49

After 50

Study of a Lone Beast 51

Subnivean (or Holding Back the Year) 52

I Would Let Go, If Only It Came Naturally 63

Torpor, Interrupted 64

Editorial Reviews

To be alive in the natural world means to live with death, riding the wheel as it turns joy to sorrow to hope to pain to love and over again. Emily Pittinos stops each moment in its tracks, and delivers that moment to us in fullness, in the good, hard light of her heart and will. The world of this book is sparsely populated: love held close, loss held loosely as if it too could be lost. The speaker aches for another’s loss, and finds layers of compassion, loops of time travel, long miles of forgiveness, and her own ache to treasure and know. What an exquisite combination of wonder and wisdom Pittinos has: she knows that even the word ‘whole’ has a hole in it, and there’s her eye, looking through.”—Brenda Shaughnessy, judge, Iowa Poetry Prize

“The tender elegiac fragments that fill this book—the look of the earth, the echo of despair—coalesce into one immense question: How can it be, this thing called Death? That question gives rise to others: What is beauty, forgiveness, recklessness, instinct? To consider these irresolvable questions is to admit to this difficult truth: ‘doesn’t it hurt / to be human.’”—Mary Jo Bang, author, A Doll for Throwing

“Torn between an instinct to imagine the past as different (‘the wreck undone’) and the urge to construct a future, better self (‘hazy glow in which / I am brighter: kinder: unorphanable’), Emily Pittinos shows us how time is ultimately as untameable as the self, and that maybe that’s as it should be. ‘How much awe have I missed by looking away,’ she asks, training her eye squarely on the present’s ever-shifting mix of shame and clarity, beauty and regret, mystery and joy. In so doing, Pittinos finds not resolution but resolve, to make room for the self’s wilderness, to trust the wilderness: ‘I’d be lost / without my own bright footpath.’ The poems here flash with risk and grace, equally. The Last Unkillable Thing is a stirring, deeply felt debut.”—Carl Phillips, author, Pale Colors in a Tall Field

From the Publisher