Letter from Brooklyn

By Jacob Scheier

The second collection from a Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry winner

In Letter from Brooklyn, Jacob Scheier examines love, loss, history, identity, protest, and popular culture. At the heart of his new poems is the notion that we understand who we are by where we have been. Here, a confessional voice digs deep into a radical Jewish heritage rooted in New York City. Everything is at once political and poetic, inseparable from intimate experience and personal heartbreak. Scheier moves from the inner worlds of grief and love to form a poetic dialectic between the familial and the historical.
Whether eating in a knish restaurant on the Lower East Side or falling in and then out of love with the Brooklyn Bridge, being startled while biking down a prairie road or searching for a European village wiped clear off the map, with depth and originality Scheier confronts the question of where home is and what it means amid private and public loss.

• Language: English
• Publisher: ECW Press
• Release date: Apr 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9781770903883

Book preview

For Libby (1946–2000) and Michael

You do not live in America. No such place exists. Your clay is the clay of some Litvak shtetl, your air the air of the steppes — because she carried the old world on her back across the ocean, in a boat, and put it down on Grand Concourse Avenue or in Flatbush . . . You can never make that crossing that she made,for such Great Voyages in this world do not anymore exist.

— Rabbi Isidor Chemelwitz, Angels in America by Tony Kushner

PRE-OCCUPY

how weak / we were, and right.

— Robert Lowell, The March 2

Under General Washington’s stone-stretched arm,

less than two hundred of us gathered on the steps

while a passing double-decker (the tourists’

photographs, our posterity) muffled

the shouts lobbed at our Bastille,

the Goldman Sachs tower. "You fucked up,

suck it up," I mumbled, beneath the chant,

investing only so far. Behind me the

NYSE’s spangled banner stripes were

a shade of barium against the grainy day.

Police officers milled . . . Rain trickled,

smudged slogans, and dispersed the crowd.

I took cover under a Starbucks awning —

its glowing emblem swung in the wind.

LETTER FROM BROOKLYN

I can already see how this will end.

How I will grow tired of the bridge’s

steep incline, and the absent-minded tourists

wandering into the bicycle path.

The weather will turn cold.

But that all happens later.

For now it is the early edge of fall,

leaves green still while the air narrows,

is slightly crisp, almost grazing

the hair of my arm like a passing stranger,

as though the air has been forced into intimacy

by the brevity of daylight.

But when it starts darkening at 4,

this closeness, I know, will be a felt distance,

like someone drawing your attention

to their lack of intimacy.

These days I am still walking at a cathedral pace

beneath the branches bending across avenues,

brownstones like rows of lived-in chapels,

like a pop-up picture book I could have had as a child,

but didn’t. How Brooklyn makes me nostalgic

for the moment I am walking inside of.

These late afternoons filled

with a loneliness that makes me feel

distinctly myself, and an awareness

of how rare that is.

THE WORLD-CHANGING BUSINESS

When I asked her if she feels she sacrificed her life to the Communist Party . . . (s)he says: Sacrificed my life! Of course not. Hon, we were in the world-changing business. You can’t get much better than that."

— Vivian Gornick (interviewing Maggie McConnel), The Romance of American Communism

The world-changing business

was the family business. My father

took me to the storefront at the edge of history,

saying one day all this will be yours.

But our store was the world and it wasn’t

supposed to belong to anyone

or it was supposed to belong to all of us.

I didn’t understand it either.

For the world already was that way