Self-Portrait with Cephalopod

Kathryn Smith

Description

Environmental collapse. The betrayals and alliances of the animal world. A father who works in a timber mill. The celebrities in our feeds, the stories we tell ourselves. Loss, never-ending loss. Self-Portrait with Cephalopod—selected by francine j. harris as winner of the Jake Adam York Prize—is an account of being a girl, and then a woman, in the world; of being a living creature on a doomed planet; of being someone who aspires to do better but is torn between attention and distraction.

Here, Kathryn Smith offers observations and anxieties, prophecies and prayers, darkness and light—but never false hope. Instead, she incises our vanities and our hypocrisies, “the bloody hand holding back / the skin,” revealing “the world’s inner workings, / rubbery and caught between the teeth.” These are the poems of someone who feels her and our failings in the viscera, in the bones, and who bears witness to that pain on the page.

Self-Portrait with Cephalopod is an urgent and necessary collection about living in this precarious moment, meditative and resolutely unsentimental.

Sujets

• Women Authors
• Themes
• Subjects
• contemporary
• modern
• América
• 21st century
• General officer
• Loss
• Poetry
• General
• American
• Grief
• Death
• Nature

Informations

• Publié par: Milkweed Editions
• Date de parution: 09 février 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781571317483
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 Mo

Extrait

SELF-PORTRAIT WITH CEPHALOPOD
SELF-PORTRAIT WITH CEPHALOPOD
poems
KATHRYN SMITH
Jake Adam York Prize | Selected by francine j. harris
MILKWEED EDITIONS
2021, Text by Kathryn Smith 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 2021 by Milkweed Editions Printed in Canada Cover design by Mary Austin Speaker Cover art by Mandy Barker 21 22 23 24 25 5 4 3 2 1 First Edition
Milkweed Editions, an independent nonprofit publisher, gratefully acknowledges sustaining support from our Board of Directors; the Alan B. Slifka Foundation and its president, Riva Ariella Ritvo-Slifka; the Amazon Literary Partnership; the Ballard Spahr Foundation; Copper Nickel ; the McKnight Foundation; the National Endowment for the Arts; the National Poetry Series; the Target Foundation; and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. Also, this activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund. For a full listing of Milkweed Editions supporters, please visit milkweed.org .

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Smith, Kathryn, 1977- author.
Title: Self-portrait with cephalopod : poems / Kathryn Smith.
Description: First edition. | Minneapolis, Minnesota : Milkweed Editions, 2021. | Summary: Self-Portrait with Cephalopod was selected by Francine J. Harris as the 2019-2020 winner of the Jake Adam York Prize --Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020028615 (print) | LCCN 2020028616 (ebook) | ISBN 9781571315175 (paperback ; acid-free paper) | ISBN 9781571317483 (ebook)
Subjects: LCGFT: Poetry.
Classification: LCC PS3619.M58927 S45 2021 (print) | LCC PS3619.M58927 (ebook) | DDC 811/.6--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020028615
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020028616
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. Self-Portrait with Cephalopod was printed on acid-free 100% postconsumer-waste paper by Friesens Corporation.
Contents
Ode to Super Friends and Nature Television
1.
Creation Myth
Dumb Beasts
Poem for Trending Tragedy
Photos of Pig That Appears to Have Blue Fat Beneath Skin Shared on Social Media
Dear Sirs
Do You Want to See More?
Job Qualifications
There Are So Many Ways to Decide What to Kill and What to Rescue
That s Like the Oldest Trick in the Book, Next to Putting a File in the Cake
Today is the Day
Regarding the Advertised Position
2.
Spell to Turn the World Around
Psalm Formula: Anti-epistle
The Windows Kept On
Cast Your Cares Upon Him
Chronic and Nameless
What Spoils in the Sun
Psalm Formula: Of One Afflicted
Like Humans
Waking Late to a Late Spring
Parable of the Sower
Concerning Nectar, Concerning Brack
Cracking the Egg
Meditation Among the Fragments
3.
The Danger
Independence Day
Self-Portrait with Cephalopod and Digitalis Purpurea
Sulfur
The Young Eat What These Birds Disgorge from Their Crops
All God s Creatures Got a Place in the Choir
And the Shrill Shall Lead the Blind
Perception
After the Funeral
Revisiting Salt Creek
Psalm Formula: Of the Psalmist
4.
Most of Us Aren t Beautiful, Though Some Learn How
Of Gods and Galaxies
Legends Say
Inheritance
When I Stepped on the Mouths of Other Creatures, I Did Not Apologize
Situs Inversus
Salt-Washed Pictograph Just Beyond the Abandoned Bunker
Tree of Life
A Permeable Membrane in the Mutable Cosmos
Notes
Acknowledgments
You could die out there. You could live forever.
TESS GALLAGHER
Ode to Super Friends and Nature Television
Days when the planet seems particularly poised
for disaster, I wear both my cephalopod T-shirt
and my cephalopod ring. Have you heard of a more
Anthropocene coping mechanism? I do it
for the birds with nowhere to land at the critical
point in their migration, for the skewed seasons
and the jungle ants with parasite-skewered brains.
Cave dwellers evolve to survive their sealed-over eyes.
Who needs eyes on a planet wobbling its axis
like a Tilt-A-Whirl? No wonder I wake
motion sick, the fact of death and the ocean and
the mouthparts of insects brimming the list of things
I can t control. Wonder Twin powers, activate!
Form of a fang, a blood-thirsty proboscis,
a tidal turnaround. I wear pants the color of a sea
cucumber, wash my octopus shirt on the saltwater setting.
Anything to understand the universe s categories.
Bats aren t birds, but they re winged. Still life and stillbirth
sound like they d mean the same thing, but they don t.
Mammals are peculiar, our young feeding on us. Humans
are more peculiar yet, building intricate reefs of plastic
and dread. The beauty of birds isn t flight. It s how they let
their young cram pointy beaks down their throats.
On a planet poised for disaster, I track my desires
in a bullet journal, cover my mammary glands
with a boneless bioluminescence. Delicate dangers
of life in the wild dominate my queue. I watch a robin
side-eye me with its bird face, asking what I did
with its family. I ve never been good at discerning
the joyful cries of children at play from the backyard
yowl of a cat fight. If I weren t such a creature of habit,
I d be a creature of soil, tunneling a nest that writhes
the earth s surface. I am sixty percent water and less than one
percent salt, and when ocean levels rise enough to wash us
from our perches, I ll have zero control over my need
to breathe air, which is not in my control to begin with.
1.
Creation Myth
And the Lord said let ants be fed
from the egg caps of walking stick
insects that hatch disguised as ants.
Let impostors pass undetected
from a subterranean nest. Let fur-bound
beasts carry exoskeletal beasts from one
hinged continent to another, and let land-
bridges break. Let humans break land
and build bridges from elements dug
from the land. Let rats unhinge ribs
from spines and climb through pipes
invented by humans to keep our
shit and nakedness away from
the shit and nakedness of rats.
Let humans set poisoned traps.
And thus I tell you: An erroneous vision
of heaven and hell shall come to you
in books, and this will divide you.
Some will say it s possible
for a child to die and come back
from death having seen the realm
of God. But some will say what
does it matter when earth is a lonely
chasm where children die unnoticed as
we sharpen our knives and whiten
our teeth and tighten our skin and
implore our screens to refresh.
Dumb Beasts
It is difficult to die or we die
too easily, stepping into traffic, letting
cancers consume our bones. This morning,
news of someone famous. We re so sad
for someone we didn t know; we re worth
what the world sees and not what we hide.
At the bus stop, Larry points to a squirrel
flattened in the street. I hate to see that,
he says. What can we do? Something dies
every minute-beasts by the hundreds
while we re searching the discography
of the famous departed.
Larry s worked the same job fifty years
and never missed a day. Now
that he s pointed out the dead squirrel,
I can t stop looking at it.