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    Backwards Days
    Backwards Days
    Backwards Days
    Ebook71 pages26 minutes

    Backwards Days

    By Stuart Dischell

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    About this ebook

    Sly, comic, inventive, and exuberant, the brokenhearted lyrics and dark parables of Backwards Days are cast in the spirit and craft Stuart Dischell’s poetry is known for. In this, his fourth full-length collection, he revs up both music and experience and writes poems of emotional intensity that chronicle the restlessness of desire. Sometimes grim, ever buoyant and hopeful, even in the most sorrowful or macabre situations, the poems of Backwards Days are most particularly about the movement of time, physical movement, and the movement of the heart. Through landscapes both real and of the psyche, they live on the edge of an elusive understanding never quite gotten right.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Books
    Release dateOct 2, 2007
    ISBN9781440619052
    Backwards Days
    Author

    Stuart Dischell

    Stuart Dischell's work has appeared in many publications, including The New Republic, Partisan Review, and Ploughshares. He has been awarded the Pushcart Prize and a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship in Literature. He teaches at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

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      Book preview

      Backwards Days - Stuart Dischell

      Where Wires Tangle

      Behind the bookcase is a balled-up tissue

      A safety pin and the fur of a now dead cat

      (I don’t think I will clone him)

      There is a price tag for parts

      And a key to my old apartment (hello!)

      This is the birthplace of sneezes

      The depository of receipts

      Condom wrappers (yippee)

      And coins coins coins coins

      Here is a ticket stub from the ball game

      (Row HH) a quote from a roofer

      The business card of a dwarf

      (My father had me shake his hand

      At the side show) three bobby pins

      A toothpick a suit button

      Here lies a pen with a lady

      (She’s naked upside down)

      Mold resembling a fruit peel

      A postcard of the Rockies

      (How’s the weather down there?)

      An aspirin and a root beer barrel

      And a matchbook with a number

      (I did not write the name)

      To start a fire

      You

      Out on the leaf-blown yard where the wind has made a skirmish

      In the leaves, where the red and yellow and yellow and red

      Have arranged themselves in momentary heaps like drifts

      Of snow on the right and left of the yard still mostly green,

      Where each caught leaf behind the drainpipe running down

      From the eaves, each on the lawn appears slick as fresh

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