Strange What Rises

By Gary J. Whitehead

Departing from the more whimsical tone of A Glossary of Chickens, Whitehead's last book, this new collection explores, among other subjects, childlessness in middle age, the vicissitudes of divorce, the pain of parental aging, and the mystery of mortality. Laden with regret and misgiving, but illuminated&nbs

• Language: English
• Publisher: Terrapin Books
• Release date: Jan 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9781947896147

Gary J. Whitehead

Gary J. Whitehead's poems have been published in journals, magazines, and newspapers. His third book of poetry, A Glossary of Chickens, was chosen by Paul Muldoon for the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets and published in 2013 by Princeton University Press. His work has been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, The Guardian's Poem of the Week, the BBC's Words and Music program, and American Life in Poetry. Awards for his poetry include the Anne Halley Prize from The Massachusetts Review, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, and the Pearl Hogrefe Fellowship at Iowa State University. He has been a featured poet at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival, the Princeton Poetry Festival, and the West Caldwell Poetry Festival, and has held residencies at Blue Mountain Center, Mesa Refuge, the Heinrich Böll Cottage, and Marble House Project. He teaches English at Tenafly High School in northern New Jersey.

Book preview

Wild Columbine

Some bells ring of their own accord.

Some need the boy who pulls the rope

and is lifted off his feet on the upswing.

The pigeons scatter from the tower’s

shaken air. Their paratrooper feathers

storm the shaft of light. By what

miracle does he recall, years later,

such ascension, the last time he loved

a church, was lifted, literally, by song?

These wild columbines are bells

that will never be rung

save by hummingbirds and bees,

drunk on their nectar,

having no knowledge of their reviled name.

Will we ever love that word again?

The heart claps at the sound of it,

but no sound comes, only the flowers

swinging on their stems to lift me,

feet planted like those of the hangman

who watches the hanged man kick the air.

Pretend It Was Just the Wind

Water crept into our furnished home,

the one in the flood zone but zoned

anyway, and anyway our home,

though we spent so little time there.

And now that we’ve moved on,

I think of the outlets sparking out

and my guitar rising against the wall

until it fell and became a boat

that drifted from room to room,

knocking into legs of tables and chairs.

I think of the books the water took

from the shelves and opened

at its leisure as it snaked and rose,

the rain still rapping at the roof

and at the swollen windows.

And of all the items of our life—

our braided rugs, the dog’s bed

and bowls, the sofa with its pillows,

the lamps, the photos, the figurines—

all of them out of their element and into another,

which held them and rocked them gently.

The Weight

Heavier than I would have thought,

heavier than a sack of flour,

than a bag of Vidalias or, better yet,

a meshed bunch of oranges,

she smelled vaguely of baby powder

and milky spit. Yes, she was heavy,

and my arms, after five minutes,

hurt, but I held her anyway,

heavy as she was,

and Laurence, her mother,

said I had a way though I didn’t

think I did and still don’t. And now

I can’t remember the