Railsplitter

By Maurice Manning

Railsplitter, the seventh collection from Pulitzer Prize Finalist and Guggenheim Fellow Maurice Manning, envisions the role of poetry in the life of Abraham Lincoln. Manning, who writes each piece in Lincoln’s persona, provides a lasting reflection on how poetry guided and shaped the President’s mind while leading a divided nation. Equal parts prophetic and rich in both rural folklore and literary allusions—from Shakespeare, to Whitman, to Poe, to the comedic—Railsplitter transcends the darkness of Lincoln’s time, to imagine a new lore entirely—one comprised of buzzard feather quills, horse treats in a top hat, and finally, a fateful bullet. Lincoln, who was born nearby to Maurice Manning’s childhood home in Kentucky, is alive again, in new form.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
• Release date: Jan 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9781619322127

Maurice Manning

MAURICE MANNING is the author of four previous books of poems. His last book, The Common Man, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. A winner of the Yale Younger Poets Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship, he teaches at Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky.

Book preview

To a Chigger

O itchy beast of tiny figure,

when I scratched myself I made you bigger;

though you began as but a chigger,

you redder rose,

a pistol-butt without a trigger,

thus we were foes.

In armpit high or ankle lower

you left me last to be the knower

that you were first to be the goer

where sweat may trickle,

and I was felled as by a mower

with scythe and sickle.

Though felled hyperbolizes, true,

the minor wounds I got from you,

the itchiness I felt undue,

a fierce attacking

I never would have dreamed to woo

from one so lacking.

Yet me you often so infested,

I felt my life had been divested

and bitterness I had ingested,

in the hotter days

of youth when meaning is contested

in lofty ways.

But in age and temperament I seasoned

and with your kind I learned and reasoned,

as an older dog contends with fleas and

resolves the pest

deserves its life, though it has