Night & Ox

By Jordan Scott

bronchia think
form a bombsight
think periosteum singing
particle falconry workpiece
two lowcut hills seeking
what stone is
for body
is herd
alliterations

Night & Ox is a long poem working its interruptions to a degree where it's broken by the will to live. A poem that invokes expansive loneliness, where the poet's emotional response is to endure. A crushed line of astral forms and anatomy in perpetual remove; it is a poem that nurtures vulnerability: some soft-footed embryo sounds against language’s viscera. Night & Ox possesses a feral minimalism for those too tired and too frantic with joy to cope with narrative.

‘A fierce, ladderlike cri de cÅ?ur – at times a cri de cur – Night & Ox pulses with sawblade nocturnes that gnaw through the very rungs on which they’re wrung. One part Jabberwocky-talkie, one part fatherhood ode, the poem seeks a threshold, where the “mondayescent * gives way to ardour, splendour, even love. Scott is a cosmoglot of the throat’s ravine, and this is his manic, pandemonic article of faith.’ – Andrew Zawacki

Praise for Blert:

‘Scott takes us down to the basement of words, where sound and rhythm rule, and poets learn their craft. Blert is a strange and gorgeous work of linguistic materialism.' – Dennis Lee

• Language: English
• Publisher: Coach House Books
• Release date: Oct 11, 2016
• ISBN: 9781770564831

Jordan Scott

Jordan Scott is the author of Silt (2005), blert (2008) and, with Stephen Collis, Decomp (2013). Scott is the 2015/16 Writer-in-Residence at Simon Fraser University. He lives in Port Coquitlam, BC, Canada.

Book preview

sunny edge

of outcry’s

tastic harpsichord

my pleasure

eellike

living

in hostile

sorrow

in unfulfilled

mornings

come osteoderm

necklace clutching, come

pissant sphere

of root position

live sweetly

unownered deer

bubbles, stick

finger lake

taser azure

nightdress

you’re in

heartbreak

breathable

flourish

slake

calm

mouth

eyebite

loganberries vein

comet wrote

carnate

wiretap lip

fistula tizzy

circus cell

blazeday

break by

dying

between day

dark

and proton

bouquet plankton

earworm

sunspot

fulm and flume

windchill reflex

starlit parsnips

frill underfur

cushion croaks

elm

luminous

seasand

claspers

scapegrace

deep

blowhole

bandwidth sheesh

liken

this

feeling

aquatile sun

trialect

snotpaper’s

night-shirting

cuttlefish

the

coil

I

am

mouth

I

am

silt still

planetoid

fruitfulness

instagramming

stratosphere’s

whirl

brick dust

milk powder

milk me

facesplitting

beehive

purpler

than

cupcakes

purple

subroutines

I

sleep

street

drain

seems italic

strikethrough

night

lunacy

or

rivery

rubs

alone

ankle nude

long

lines

of

lynx

scat

we’re

in

we’re

snowsleep

flurry mask

my

chant

to

follow

your

placenta

a

meadow

my

self

a

boy

licking

plate’s

massacre

patterns

twenty

thin

strokes

October

trackless

October

throw

boybird

blissed

any subtext

sacral

reaching any

table, grape

sacral

covered

mustard

stone

should

I

ever

feel

wonder

again

colossal

leg cluster

string drown

infant

lake

system

nervous

voltage

swap

vogue

my

bedwhole

loch

my

spur-fat

juiced vapour

spur Sockeye

egging

hormone snag

spur glottal

gland oil

juiced vapour

green sweat

waterboard

heartache

it’s eggskull

tiny blot

vortices

agalaxia tiptoes

because

I

say

so

you’re

onthrob’s anthill

and flickout

perfect a