August Kleinzahler’s collections include Green Sees Things in Waves; The Strange Hours Travellers Keep, which won the Griffin Poetry Prize; Sleeping It Off in Rapid City, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award; The Hotel Oneira and Snow Approaching on the Hudson. His memoir of his childhood in New Jersey, Cutty, One Rock, came out in 2005. Much of it first appeared in the LRB, as did many of the pieces included in Sallies, Romps, Portraits and Send-Offs: Selected Prose 2000-2016.
Under the floorboards Shadow and Smoke bark through these windy summer nights, always at queer intervals. Something’s got up their noses or call and response with a distant yard. All summer long awakened from dreams by barks, remembering each of them through, shabby kinescopes. The guys upstairs come fetch them in the morning and disappear till night, always leaving the light on in the...
The planet may have tilted, if only a hint when the shelf of cloud burnt angrily before dusk jack-o’-lantern stuff
her hair the colour of her coat, fallwear
*******
The wet stain her bathing-suit left on the bench the shape of...
It was a lost dream, a bridges and heights and headed home dream, but too long, far too long and mazey and all the wrong tone. And then there was that station, so massive, with its tiers, platforms, girders and steps, trains rushing through on the express track, filled to bursting, commuters illuminated, each face vivid, highlighted – is that you? – exasperation, fatigue, concern...
Red pear leaves take the light at four, and a patch of brick on the south, rear wall stripped of wisteria: the two reds embering a little while then dying back into the shadows. A corner of the afternoon is all, maybe half an hour, not much more – October, November ... the beech tree bare now.
Sunday’s blow would have done it. And always the Interstate out there, like surf,...
Luminoso e dolce
Suzerainty
Impetigo
Colourless green ideas sleep furiously
Titrate
Spinners&darners
Farallons
Dag
Frottage
Slow loris
Gating
A bit of the other
Cuisse-de-nymphe
Chamfer
Amber, civet and musk cods
Wahoo McDaniel
Chlamydia
Mortised-and-tenoned
Huitzilopochtli
A bit of rough
Chalumeaux
Dingleberry
Esculent
Wing-nut
Sforzato
Ten dwarves took turns doing headstands...
The poems in Live from the Hong Kong Nile Club are taken from August Kleinzahler’s first six publications. All were small press books with relatively limited circulations – the first,...
In a power-rhyming slap-happy parody of Thirties doom-mongering published in 1938 William Empson famously had ‘Just a Smack at Auden’: What was said by Marx, boys, what did he...
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