Sandhour

By Robert Ostrom

SANDHOUR, the follow-up to Rob Ostrom's award-winning first book, Ritual and Bit, offers a brave and intimate look at the interiors of family, home, place, trauma, and childhood. With gravitas and deep concentration, the poems of SANDHOUR startle and shine. Highly artful in their approach to syntax, these vivid and crushing poems stand out (as Ostrom's poems often do) for their ability to distill and rearrange the traditional lyric meditation. Occasionally, there are poets so original that they chart a course for us as readers, inventing for us (seemingly in real time) the forms that best reveal the larger mythologies at work. SANDHOUR is unlike anything you will read this year.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Saturnalia Books
• Release date: Oct 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9781947817111

Book preview

BURN

PROLOGUE

hope a trailer lack a simple want beginning notion in the gut was real

was not the notion written on the brain a spirit a temper a well of

a power from the well and it does it is as fire to a loving home

WRITTEN ON SKIN

the veins branching

up her legs my mother’s

legs girdling roots

left behind the trailer park

for a gusty farmhouse small white

with green trim a garden a yard

grunts and squeals

the seven-fingered

landlord’s pig farm

did they mimic

did my sisters

the Cumberlands

through the window

above the kitchen

sink their colors

in autumn she says

light the house

evenings fill rooms with mom

rehearsing choir songs on the upright

and the smell of hamburgers

on the pond across the street

sisters and mother ice skate

should I tell you their names

barely born

into wickedness

winter and the oil

embargo everyone

sleeps in the same bed

the painful

varicose veins

branching up

her legs

from my

mother’s legs

the doctor

divines

baptize straightaway

should what have

you occur

in the Southern Baptist

church on Walnut Bottom

Road sisters pray their best

our father who art in heaven

our father is only here

when he hears his name

roaches wander

the floor under her feet

in metal stirrups

the doctor shifts his grip

quotes Born Again to dad

mom cries out I am here

new life smells like earth

she has it in her blood

what’s to come is inherent

and foaming at the mouth

MY FATHER’S HOUSE HAS MANY ROOMS

truth of this place like sand dunes only photographs unreliables biases and sister stories in this memory is myth what the first frost did to the yard

off the turnpike the bridge to a trail to a staircase to a lake called trauma an autumn