{"id":667,"date":"2010-07-07T23:23:49","date_gmt":"2010-07-08T03:23:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/2010\/07\/07\/nick-lantz-battle-alexander-issus\/"},"modified":"2010-07-07T23:23:49","modified_gmt":"2010-07-08T03:23:49","slug":"nick-lantz-battle-alexander-issus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/2010\/07\/07\/nick-lantz-battle-alexander-issus\/","title":{"rendered":"Nick Lantz, “Battle of Alexander at Issus”"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"nick-lantz-2.jpg\"<\/p>\n

\n

Off in the mountains a hermit checks
\nhis rabbit traps before returning
\nto his hut for the night. The rabbits grow
\nbold near dawn and dusk, the hours
\nwhen clouds lower ladders of light
\ndown the mountainsides. The hermit
\nhasn’t admired this light in decades.
\nAt this time of day he is always bent
\nlow, unfastening the thin leather snares
\nfrom around still-warm necks. If he hears
\nwhat sounds like thunder in the valley
\none cloudless evening as he ties another
\nlimp body to his belt, he thinks only
\nof returning home to bed, the rabbit fleas
\nthat torment his sleep, the door that never
\nquite closes against the cold night air.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Back in February, I featured another Nick Lantz poem, “Lacuna, Triptych of the Battle<\/a>,” from the collection We Don’t Know We Don’t Know<\/a>. The poem above is from the second of Lantz’s collections published this year, The Lightning That Strikes the Neighbors’ House<\/i><\/a>, which also contains “Portmanterrorism<\/a>” (from The Writer’s Almanac<\/i>). Oh, and back when I wrote about We Don’t Know…<\/i>, I didn’t know you could find “Your Family’s Farm, Empty<\/a>” online, or maybe you couldn’t, then.<\/p>\n

Lantz discussed this book in an interview with The Rumpus<\/i><\/a>: “It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the much-revised remnants of my MFA thesis, and it had been collecting rejection slips since 2005. A poem in that book alludes to the Ship of Theseus, a boat that was supposedly maintained over many years by replacing its parts piecemeal as they deteriorated, begging the question of whether it was still the same ship, and, if not, at what point it ceased being that original ship. That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s how I feel about The Lightning<\/i>. If you were to dig up my actual MFA thesis (please don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t), you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d see only a handful of the original poems. With The Lightning<\/i>, I worked from the poems up. I was figuring out what that book was about as I assembled, disassembled, and reassembled it.”<\/p>\n

By the way, Rumpus<\/i> readers were also treated to the premiere publication of another Lantz poem: “How to Dance When You Do Not Know How to Dance<\/a>.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Off in the mountains a hermit checks his rabbit traps before returning to his hut for the night. The rabbits grow bold near dawn and dusk, the hours when clouds lower ladders of light down the mountainsides. The hermit hasn’t admired this light in decades. At this time of day he is always bent low, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/667"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=667"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/667\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=667"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=667"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=667"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}