Julie Hanson, “Cold Cereal and Milk at 3 A.M.”
What can make something so simple taste so good,
so indulgent? What have I done, and what have I not,
what have I said, what have I sent that comes back now,
willed or misapplied, in a boomerang of harm?This is a time of holding in the mouth, of chewing slowly
even these softened squares. The body is comforted by this
as it has been by the remembered scent of those I have loved
who are far and gone from me and dead. Brought close
with their completed lives, they seem to have known me wholly.Even this wheat-sweetened milk is delicious. And when one
sunken piece turns up—a surprise ending—its gray ghost
stirred and revealed, a small celebration takes place then,
under the ribbed ceiling, near the back of the gums.
Julie Hanson’s Unbeknownst is a winner of the 2010 Iowa Poetry Prize. (Yesterday, we featured the other winner, L.S. Klatt’s Cloud of Ink.) The collection also includes “Allocation” (published in Terrain.org) and “Remedial Weeding” (originally published in The Cincinnati Review).
Of Unbeknownst, University of Iowa Press editor Holly Carver has said, “I’ve been working with these Poetry Prize books for 20-some years, and to my mind, her [manuscript] was one of the freshest and brightest books that we’ve ever published. It just seemed to have an honesty and an accessibility that made it really stand above a lot of other really good, cleverly crafted poems that maybe didn’t ring quite as true.”
5 April 2011 | poetry |
L.S. Klatt, “Old World Birds”
When you talk to the bee-eaters they pretend
you are not there. You can follow them
into Madagascar & across the Mozambique
Chanel & still not register
an acknowledgment. This is sad because you
mean no harm & you have taken
great pains to mimic their trills, chuckles,
& whistles. Just to hear Darwin
speak of them, you know that the scythe
of their bills is made for the erratic
snatch of wings midflight, &, as the wings
are indigestible, they eject them. This is
not to say that bee-eaters sugar their songs
with upbeats before disgorging—far
from it. Sometimes they beat the bee
against a branch, then croak. You are
surprised that a diet of stingers yields a rain-
bow plumage, but, given one more reason
to quail, you hardly blush. The mistake
is to imagine on moonlit nights
you are one of them.
Cloud of Ink, the second poetry collection by L.S. Klatt, is one of the recipients of the 2010 Iowa Poetry Prize. Other poems in the collection include “A Sudden Unspeakable Indignation” (published in Eleven Eleven), “Ovation” (Drunken Boat), and “Crete” (Verse; along with “Cortona”).
“I’m purely a poet of organic form,” Klatt said in a recent interview. “I tend to write in blocks of text, then pattern them into lines and/or stanzas, playing the symmetrical against the asymmetrical. I like that tension. The shaping process is largely intuitive—mostly I just want to keep myself and the audience engaged.”
4 April 2011 | poetry |