Fludde: Poems

By Peter Mishler and Dean Young

Selected by Dean Young as winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry, Fludde draws on Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience to critique and dismantle contemporary American values and conditioning: commodification, imperialism, toxic masculinity. Surreal and satirical, Mishler channels the voices of disillusioned middle management alongside the freewheeling imaginative vision of children to disrupt the fixity of our received ideas.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sarabande Books
• Release date: May 15, 2018
• ISBN: 9781946448200

Peter Mishler

Peter Mishler was born and raised in New Jersey. He earned a BFA in literature from Emerson College and both an MS in English Education and an MFA in creative writing from Syracuse University.  He has received fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and his work has appeared in Diagram, Black Warrior Review, Redivider, Gulf Coast, Ninth Letter, and the anthology Best New Poets 2013, among other places. Mishler curates a contemporary poetry interview series for Literary Hub. He lives in Kansas City.

Book preview

OLD WORLD

I am collecting insects

from the ground

before the water table

turns on us again.

I am breathing in

the bread of the living

though my little ghosts

are in tune with what I take.

Let me not deceive you

first flowers of sacrilege:

I won’t go bawling

from the labyrinth,

my rashes and sores

handled wrongly.

The physician may rest

in his mountain.

The wefts and warps

of the globe may rest.

My love with her tongue

at the tip of the truncheon.

Me with my tongue

asleep at her hipbone.

A field of horses

disperse before

the revelling places

for monsters.

Let the beleaguered

return to their safes.

Let the dying

be returned to the sea.

Our failed hobbies burnt

in the rites of idiots.

Our carted rubble sits

in its fine anterior rage.

SUBLUNARY LIFE

The boy scouts lined up on the freezing banks

about to recite their summerland cheer.

In your bath it trickled down from your scalp

to your golden neck. The parts of me

that could see this were always blundering.

I laid them to rest in the heather

beside a half row of blue city shuttles.

They comfortably watch the semaphores

braiding the sky with silvery aircrafts

above the disengaged shallows. A dish

of its waters need not be drawn up for you.

Our bodies grew smaller when we made