The Logan Notebooks
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Mountain West Poetry Series
“These poems are intent on calling out the migratory beauty of this world, in a neighbor-voice: friendly, from the yard nearby, pointing out stuff we might not have noticed. They frequently employ that most ancient of forms, the list, to show us what we shine a light on, what we look past, what we reflect, what we miss. In that way, they speak like the meadowlark who says, See you! See you! These poems are for when we shall no longer fear the ecstatic, because we’ll know that ecstasy too is quotidian, as daily as a meadowlark’s shopping list.”
—Eleni Sikelianos “In her second collection, Rebecca Lindenberg turns her scrutiny to the American West without forgetting the many layers of sediment and memory there and in other elsewheres. From grocery stores in Utah to a synagogue in Rome to cloud-gazing everywhere, in poems at turns laconic and lush, wistful and wry, Lindenberg shows how beauty and absurdity can and will persist—even, or especially—in the loss of our multiple loves and multiple selves.” —Tarfia Faizullah “Recursive and elliptical, the poems in Rebecca Lindenberg’s The Logan Notebooks are as difficult to depict as they are to forget. Like clouds (themselves, so omnipresent and imperative that Lindenberg confronts them on the first page), these poems shift, then settle into shape, then shift once again. More usual iterations of poetry give way to paragraphs of unimpeachable prose, itemized narratives in which whole, epic plots are cached. Lists run left to right as if they actually listed, like boats off-ballast or stand-alone willows in windstorms. Catalogues are first climactic then cathartic. What she does not write, she has somehow written. Aphorisms become offerings. Almost every line is a sutra. If ‘anyone who feels they have to lie’ is a thing that has lost its power, then Rebecca Lindenberg need not worry. Neither these poems nor the poet who conceives them flinches at gut-punch truth.”
—Jill Alexander Essbaum “The American West, in its mythical and real-time complexity, is ‘itched out of reverie’ and ‘brought into the deep groove of the present’ in Rebecca Lindenberg’s The Logan Notebooks. The grotesquerie of capitalism hangs in the background, sometimes the foreground, but her lines don’t flinch as they ‘attend to these/details that might later/divert you.’ Above all this is a book about relationships—to a beloved, a family, a landscape, a country, and language itself. ‘Somewhere between the sayable and the unsayable,’ Lindenberg’s poems startle life from a fractured world. The Logan Notebooks is a balm and an anomaly.” —Joseph Massey
Clouds, mountains, flowering trees. Difficult things. Things lost by being photographed. Things that have lost their power. Things found in a rural grocery store. These are some of the lists, poems, prose poems, and lyric anecdotes compiled in The Logan Notebooks, a remix and a reimagining of The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon, a collection of intimate and imaginative observations about place—a real place, an interior landscape—and identity, at the intersection of the human with the world, and the language we have (and do not yet have) for perceiving it.
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The Logan Notebooks Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Lamp Brighter than Foxfire Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Hungry Moon Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Escape Velocity Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHouse of Sugar, House of Stone Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5&luckier Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBlue Heron Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe City She Was Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Songs Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Two Standards Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Verging Cities Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5We Remain Traditional Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Lapidary's Nosegay Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsUpper Level Disturbances Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWe are Starved Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsFurthest Ecology Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDears, Beloveds Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Minuses Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWest : Fire: Archive Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5
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The Logan Notebooks - Rebecca Lindenberg
NOTEBOOKS
CLOUDS
Cloud shaped book, opening. Cloud shaped like a sphinx. Cloud shaped like a steam engine blowing steam. Cloud shaped like a UFO. Cloud shaped like a handbag. Cloud shaped like the first thing you spoke when we met. Cloud shaped like a peacock, or a cloud-breathing dragon. Cloud shaped like an old-fashioned clock. Cloud shaped like a rabbit chasing a crow. Cactus-shaped cloud. Lampshade-shaped cloud. Cloud shaped like your laugh. Cloud shaped like a roast chicken with wee chef’s hats on its feet. Cloud shaped like a cartoon drawing of a cloud. Cloud shaped like a horse ridden by a monkey wearing oven mitts. Cloud shaped like Texas, or Wales. Cloud shaped like a comet. Cloud shaped like a fading demand. Cloud shaped like a boot, or a bottle, or a branding iron with a sun in the middle. Cloud shaped like a map of the sky. Cloud shaped like a rhapsody. Like a fever dream. Cloud shaped like a man helping a woman brush off her skirt, or a woman lifting her skirt, or a dance in which they become clouds.
IMPROVISATION (ARRIVAL)
He watches while I talk
about being in