The Miraculous Courageous

by Josh Booton

Overview

The Miraculous Courageous is a fractured epic, a sequence which seeks not to explain but to evoke the mind of one boy and his experience with autism. In the tradition of Carson's Autobiography of Red, Booton constructs a landscape both familiar and uncanny, a territory where our inner workings burn with the luminosity of jellyfish and "darkness turns the lighthouse on." These poems are agile, slippery, glancing at the camera then quickly away, skewing the boundaries between lyric and monologue, vignette and scene. These poems are a bridge. And through their deft conflation of inner and outer worlds, the self and the other, The Miraculous Courageous marks a rich and startling immersion in the mind of autism.

What People Are Saying

In this stunning sequence of sixty short monologues, Josh Booton sets a clock in motion, a minute hand that keeps lyric time, moving back and forth, outwards and inwards. The voice at its center belongs to a boy on the spectrum whose preoccupations with seahorses and Jacques Cousteau offer us glimpses of that "secret blue little aqualung" we call poetic wonder. Each perfect rectangle of verse becomes a porthole for the reader. A clear narrative progression extends its plumb-line into the dark glamour of those depths, into which the poet plunges to return with "the whole day in one hand the night another." —Carolina Ebeid

If, as Socrates asserts, philosophy begins in wonder, and if, as Emily Dickinson recommends, we do well to "Tell all the truth but tell it slant," then the autistic speaker in Josh Booton's new collection The Miraculous Courageous is equal parts philosopher and poet, wondering at such mysteries as the contrast between seemingly empty ocean and "all / that life crowded so close" around a reef, and slanting us such truths as that happiness "smells exactly like tangerines" and that one need not be lonely in a world astir "with the rough of starfish / and rain on garbage can lids." —H. L. Hix

About the Author

Josh Booton's first book, The Union of Geometry & Ash, was awarded the Dorothy Brunsman Poetry Prize. His work has been supported by grants from The University of Texas at Austin, the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Foundation and the Elizabeth George Foundation. He lives in Boise, Idaho, where he works with children and teens with autism spectrum disorder as a pediatric speech therapist.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781602354470
Publisher:	Parlor Press
Publication date:	02/07/2018
Series:	Free Verse Editions
Pages:	80
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.19(d)

About the Author

Josh Booton's first book, The Union of Geometry & Ash, was awarded the Dorothy Brunsman Poetry Prize. His work has been supported by grants from The University of Texas at Austin, the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Foundation and the Elizabeth George Foundation. He lives in Boise, Idaho, where he works with children and teens with autism spectrum disorder as a pediatric speech therapist.

Table of Contents

1. the books all quote my brain is wrong

2. in my first memory my mom is crying

3. anthony says seahorses are gay but

4. this is where we shakehands stare

5. the seahorse isn't a real horse

6. my mom said don't always go on

7. today we practice asking questions

8. the moon is the ocean's clock

9. the seahorse can hardly swim though

10. tell me about your friends she says

11. weather wrecks everything here grays

12. I like tangerines no. 2 pencils sharpened

13. how was it Jacques diving under

14. today we practice telling jokes but

15. this is my collection of brokenmachines

16. anthony said snap out of it says you can't

17. if you put an ocean seahorse in a tank

18. we are all detectives she said searching

19. I like the sound of yelling faraway

20. mom says the leaves eat light she says

21. there's one thing I don't understand

22. it doesn't hurt as much as you

23. people on tv are cyring again because

24. if divers shine waterlights on them

25. there are places so dark at the bottom

26. the clouds right now are cumulonimbus

27. sometimes a shock runs through me

28. I built one once from two liters

29. are there species Jacques even you

30. today we practice reading emotions

31. frogs aren't full of clockparts guts

32. the sun arrives too many strangers

33. you're a good listener you never say

34. anthony says it's my fault says he left

35. when I was young younger when

36. he didn't really mean you're a genius

37. the waves are too high today to swim

38. I'll find one once all my own but not

39. they're not helpless they can hide

40. goldfish don't have memories

41. the trees outside my window scratch

42. in another memory my brother slips

43. freshwater tiger tail thorny

44. we are making a memory moms says we are

45. anthony said a man talks with his fists

46. today we practice listening keeping

47. impossible notions are the only ones

48. who knows why they're called hands

49. my shirttag is the only thought

50. the bluffs are covered with names

51. something in the light in the way

52. are you ever lonely Jacques below

53. every clock in the house shines

54. the gulls make circles over nothing

55. I would be green the yellowygreen

56. amazing they don't get pulvarized

57. I did it last night in the bathtub Jacques

58. today we practice saying goodbye

59. the ocean takes an inch each year

60. last night I dreamed I was a seahorse