Sky.Pond.Mouth.

Author:   Kevin McLellan
Publisher:   Yas Press
Edition:   2024 ed.
Volume:   1
ISBN:  

9781735673288


Pages:   140
Publication Date:   25 March 2024
Format:   Paperback
Availability:   In stock   Availability explained
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Sky.Pond.Mouth.


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Overview

"Sky. Pond. Mouth. is a book that doesn't take much for granted--boundaries, solidity, distinctions between plants and humans, lasting companionship, faith, enduring self, health. This is a poetry of ontology, permeable and mutually dependent. Every noun is potentially non-I and I. The isolated being is the connected being and vice-versa in a constant turn-over of needing & peace-of-mind, needing & peace-of-mind. Starting with the book's title, physical and emotional qualities free-range between the animate and inanimate as though the world is written with dotted lines. Freedom, McLellan quotes A.R. Ammons, might be ""identity without identity,"" an untethering even from untethering. In the long poem ""Winterberries,"" as an example, ""The wind made the light and an ash / tree seem one, animated yet mortal, / and then it ceased. For a moment / I thought the statue in the park / was me, not of me. (Sometimes one / needs to tell someone to go away.)"" The sensual and the corporeal are geographic... It's not always comfortable. It's frankly a bit lonesome. In Sky. Pond. Mouth, a person might well be ""benthic,"" or located at the bottom of a large water body. The climate setting is dialed to thawing solitude and to the temperature on the ocean floor. In ""Clouds,"" a pond ""stretches out"" in the speaker's chest as the consequence of the loss of love, that is, of being in love for five minutes. In the forest setting of the prose poem ""A Definition of Loss,"" trees are equipped with ""mouth holes too,"" forming an orchestra which the poet joins as a soloist. Although this tree-and-human ensemble wouldn't be possible without his bravely different perceptions, the speaker's not certain that his fellow performers actually hear him. A theme of Sky. Pond. Mouth is patience: it's worth it. The drifting away from set forms is necessary for knowing more, knowing better, knowing how to know. Staying unbroken or holding the expected form only blocks our perceptions because, as McLellan says, DNA strands and a pair of eyes ""know things despite their connectedness."" In the Ecosystems section early in this book, there's a series of persona poems in which the speaker crosses over to a plant (swamp rose, pink lady's slipper, sheep laurel), a member of a marshland or renter of the unmown, not so much a flowerbed or community garden club. These plants contemplate celibacy or reject labels and judgment. Resembling illustrations of single specimens from a botanical book, they're like the poems in the book as a whole: distinct. McLellan doesn't repeat himself in this collection of prose poetry to lyric poems to longer sectioned exposition. With chiseled line breaks, intriguing meta-poetic levels, and punctuation like seed pods, these poems, if we look twice, might flourish outside the book's margin, past the grow light of the screen, even (especially) other borderlines we haven't begun to imagine. Alexandria Peary New Hampshire Poet Laureate Judge of 2024 Granite State Poetry Prize January 5, 2024"

Full Product Details

Author:   Kevin McLellan
Publisher:   Yas Press
Imprint:   Yas Press
Edition:   2024 ed.
Volume:   1
Dimensions:   Width: 15.20cm , Height: 0.80cm , Length: 20.30cm
Weight:   0.191kg
ISBN:  

9781735673288


ISBN 10:   1735673285
Pages:   140
Publication Date:   25 March 2024
Audience:   General/trade ,  General
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   In stock   Availability explained
We have confirmation that this item is in stock with the supplier. It will be ordered in for you and dispatched immediately.

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Reviews

"""My thoughts have no place / to go, except more inward."" These lines that open Kevin McLellan's ""Winterberry,"" the long final poem of SKY. POND. MOUTH might serve as epitome of the book entire. A radical interiority marks this lyric vision, ushering us all in to the common crisis not one of us knows how to share: to be a self, one who says I, in this body I have, which is mine and no one else's. Here, as a fine poet is fated to know, the self isn't singular, but like the housefly that sees with a compound-eye, the self is a compound-I. In poems that navigate the poetic inheritance of experimental queer poetries-Ashbery, Schuyler, Stein-McLellan records the inner echoes of mind and body: language and desire, illness and eros, flora and fauna, memory and moment, all interpenetrate and blur in the weird-wonder of life's within-ness. With tender care and sharp wit, McLellan gives us one of poetry's primary gifts: where we are most alone, he sees us, sings for and with us, and leaves us less alone. Dan Beachy-Quick is the author of Variations on Dawn and Dusk, longlisted for the 2019 National Book Award for Poetry, and several other books."


Author Information

Kevin McLellan is the author of: in other words you (2022 Hilary Tham Capital Collection winner selected by Timothy Liu); Ornitheology (Massachusetts Book Awards recipient); Tributary; and Round Trip. Kevin's book objects, Hemispheres and box, reside in special collections including the Blue Star Collection at Harvard University. Kevin's video Dick won Best Short Form Short at the LGBTQ Los Angeles Film Festival and it also appeared at the Flickers' Rhode Island International Film Festival, Berlin Short Film Festival, the Vancouver Queer Film Festival and others.

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