Rise and Float

Brian Tierney

Description

Full galley quantities available for poetry media, booksellers and librarians; digital galleys available for download on Edelweiss

Collaborative promotional campaign with Jake Adam York Prize partner, Copper Nickel

Cover reveal and preorder digital and social media campaign in partnership with Midtown Scholar, who is offering signed preorder copies

Individual bookseller outreach to stores where author has developed relationships, specifically Green Apple, East Bay, and Midtown Scholar

Newsletter promotion via the publisher to poetry and academic lists of more than 20,000 contacts

Advertising in Poetry Magazine, American Poets, and Copper Nickel

Hybrid virtual and in-person events in Oakland, San Francisco, Philadelphia, and Colorado

Poem from the collection, "You're the One I Wanna Watch the Last Ships Go Down With," went viral and was widely read when it was published in the Paris Review in Winter 2020

Book has received strong blurbs from Tracy K Smith, Mark Wunderlich, and Jake Adam York Prize judge Randall Mann

Book's engagement with grief, mental health, cancer, and death by suicide provides opportunities for wider coverage and crossover into larger markets
Greystone Park

derelict Psychiatric Hospital, New Jersey


I look down the corridor of shredded red paint and soft cream

messy-peeled, like wrist skin when a grater slips. Water damage


I say to Big Tim, with me on a dare here: an extension built

to relieve the Trenton mad-house seven train-stops south,


where you can buy cheap acid from a guy they call Lobotomy,

for the scar across his head. We take two small hits:


now scraps of trash greenly drift like unraveled petals

of water-lettuce, in puddles, and I swear I hear breathing.


So which of these fuckers was hers? Meaning my Great Aunt

Evelyn’s, her cell, of course, I don’t know. As I listen to Tim


kicking corroded metal instruments in a janitor’s closet,

I hear it again: her silver spoon hitting the plate, going too


deep; her laugh as good as scream. Just a few stray anecdotes

she told us that breakfast—the leather tentacles squeaking


every flinch, gloves gripping a steering wheel winter,

how the shock machine in 1960 felt all fog as it breathed


behind her eyes, dissolved her spine, chlorpromazine in a glass

of water the first time—until each surrounding color had a


sound I imagine had no end but in the body. As in a drain.

Near the wall restraints, stains only butchers would’ve known


about. Rusting holes. Holes where holes are not supposed to be.


***


You’re The One I Wanna Watch The Last Ships Go Down With

for Jess


Dr. Redacted will tell me not to tell you

this, like this,

in a poem: how it’s all right, love, that we don’t love

living. Even actors don’t

exactly love the spotlight they move through,

as your sister, the actor,

has told us; they just need to be lit

for narrative motion

to have meaning. As such it is,

with artifice, and embarrassment,

that I move through fear

to you, tonight, where I had dreams,

a short nap ago, about lines

of poetry I struck through

with everyday blues, month after

month, in the dream

after dream; an attempt

I guess to forget, if I could: defeat

sometimes is defeat

\without purpose. The news at least tells me that

much. I know now,

in fact, we don’t have to be brave,

not to survive a night

like any we’ve looked on

together, seeing blue-tinted snow

once in a K-mart

parking lot’s giant, two-headed lamp—

and my father hooked up,

up the street, with no chance

of waking—as many years ago now

as how much longer I’ve lived

with you than without.

Forgive me, again, that I write you an elegy

where a love poem should be.


***


Earth Is Not A Door


Curiosity tells us there are blue dunes

on Mars; that there was water, once, before us,

belonging to no one—

as though space exploration were a post-

colonial thought.


There are five U.S. flags left standing

on the moon, five dollars

each, stitched with nylon from Jersey, all of them

bleached into one color, now,

in the nation of nothingness. God says I don’t believe you.

And Dr. Snaut goes on about how we don’t want

other worlds, in the first film

Solaris; we just want


a mirror—which I take to mean we

cut down trees we press into reams on which we write

down our history of cutting

down the trees; or that space rocks crumble

then clump, as does my Godmom Mar-ie

on the mantle, here, in front of me, even if I shake her

& make a stupid wish. The first of us

to occupy the Americas may not have

crossed Beringia land bridge, a new report

to believe


for now; just worm routes collapsing

behind us as we move. And I felt important

then, she said, my mother

that is, about her stint calibrating circuitry

chips with miniature instruments

for Apollo 11, when she was young

and needed a few bucks for gas—


Like what happened that one time,

when we turned the two mirrors,

Sean and Constance and I,

what happened after we turned them

to face one another, in the sun, was

that the sun became an amplified burst

going down, coming in, the snow-blinded walls

in that one perfect minute

I was standing inside

a star.


Contents


Migraine

Howard Johnson’s

Rorschach #1

Greystone Park

Eleven

Cottman Avenue House Party

Bulimia

Ideation

Time and Tide


*


Nothing Has Passed Between Us But Time


*


Episode

Hearses

Polyphagia

To The Reasoning Of Eternal Voices

The Fly In The Bottle

Tailpipe

Tied Islands

Earth Is Not A Door

Bridge


*


Preamble With A Pilgrimage Inside

Fixing A Hole

Felled Cherry Plum

Breakdown

All Stars Are Lights, Not All Lights Are Stars

Judas

Whatever Rises Becomes A Light

Wormhole


*


Anthropocene


You’re The One I Wanna Watch The Last Ships Go Down With

Sujets

• Themes
• Subjects
• Nueva Jersey
• Loss
• Christianity
• Poetry
• Grief
• Death
• New Jersey

Informations

• Publié par: Milkweed Editions
• Date de parution: 08 février 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781571317728
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

RISE and FLOAT poems
BRIAN TIERNEY
Jake Adam York Prize | Selected by Randall Mann
MILKWEED EDITIONS
© 2022, Text by Brian Tierney
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher: Milkweed Editions, 1011
Washington Avenue South, Suite 300, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55415.
[phone]
milkweed.org
Published 2022 by Milkweed Editions
Printed in Canada
Cover design by Mary Austin Speaker
Cover art by Mary Austin Speaker
22 23 24 25 26 5 4 3 2 1
First Edition
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Tierney, Brian, 1985- author.
Title: Rise and float : poems / Brian Tierney.
Description: Minneapolis, Minnesota : Milkweed Editions, [2022] | Summary: “Chosen by Randall Mann as a winner of the Jake Adam York Prize, Brian Tierney’s Rise and Float depicts the journey of a poet working-remarkably, miraculously-to make our most profound, private wounds visible on the page”-- Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021030384 (print) | LCCN 2021030385 (ebook) | ISBN 9781571315199 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781571317728 (ebook)
Subjects: LCGFT: Poetry.
Classification: LCC PS3620.I375 R57 2022 (print) | LCC PS3620. I375 (ebook) | DDC 811/.6--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021030384
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021030385
Milkweed Editions is committed to ecological stewardship. We strive to align our book production practices with this principle, and to reduce the impact of our operations in the environment. We are a member of the Green Press Initiative, a nonprofit coalition of publishers, manufacturers, and authors working to protect the world’s endangered forests and conserve natural resources. Rise and Float was printed on acid-free 100% postconsumer-waste paper by Friesens Corporation.
for my parents
Contents Wormhole Howard Johnson’s rorschach #1 Greystone Park Eleven Cottman Avenue House Party Teletherapy bulimia Ideation Time and Tide * Nothing Has Passed Between Us but Time * Episode Hearses Polyphagia To the Reasoning of Eternal Voices The Fly in the Bottle Tailpipe Tied Islands Earth Is Not a Door Bridge * Preamble With a Pilgrimage Inside Fixing a Hole Felled Cherry Plum Breakdown All Stars Are Lights, Not All Lights Are Stars Judas Whatever Won’t Rise Becomes the Night Migraine * Anthropocene You’re the One I Wanna Watch the Last Ships Go Down With Notes Acknowledgments
one way with words is to tell
the lives of others
using the distance as a lens
and another way
is when there is no
distance so that water
is looking at water W.S. Merwin
Wormhole
All winter, the house groaned as in a very great depth,
so that I often couldn’t sleep. Then, one day, as if the inverse
of lightning, silence occurred, entrusted to the hour:
I became each minute, I became every direction at once
and fled from source and definite position, and returned
to my mother in plaid widow slippers, the blue flaking hallway
at the end of which she’d wrap gifts with the funny papers,
and I felt again the weight of her life shaping my fate—
When she paused, I paused. When she looked down I looked
as well, down, into the garden, at the material consequence
of a metaphysical truth: memorial flowers we’d planted,
then left. These rooms’ll outlive you I had told her once
in spite, when I was younger, not young, while she hung
our shirts above and around a busted upright to dry in the sun
of a perfect angle, in which to watch was to surrender
metamorphic mystery, but, equally, fear. Having set aside
changes I could think of as tracks to be followed, future
possibilities, arguments of a speculative nature, the roads
with nobody on them, and with no one to remember anyone
who was, I walked into that garden. When I bent to them,
the impatiens soured and gave a small yelp; some of them
had names I could not take with me. Night fell. The treasure
I thought at the outset was wholeness, was not wholeness.
A passing car went white as the head of a match, and was gone.
Howard Johnson’s
Four real pumpkins near the lobby door—
Their carved expressions sag
rural-sad, dissimilar, adjective adjective.
One eye droops. Melted angles. Smiles decaying.
Your cousin Rita’s, after her stroke. Her oblique stroke
smiles, you remember:
She was embarrassed.
My face is not my own, looking down. Embarrassed.
There is a pen for workers out back labeled staff.
No one in sight
has left something behind. An ashtray
smokes then doesn’t;
Friday night’s lip gloss on a few white filters—
You approach. Across the highway, a sign
reads What else is there? Isaiah 40:3.
The glossy paint of the sign sort of shines.
rorschach #1
‘The first mistake was to think
that Abraham had chosen
to pause—’
a splotch of ink—
so I