Country Album

By James Capozzi

At one moment, while reading James Capozzi’s manuscript, it occurred to me that he might actually be a Martian who learned to write by studying the incomplete works of John Donne, Raymond Queneau, and J. G. Ballard. But that only tells part of the story. He seems to have traveled to different countries—Spain, New Jersey, and Nevada—and recognized that all of them are foreign. Ghosts and ghostly voices rise up from the ground. Without falling into some obvious pattern or strategy, Capozzi puts words together that sound as if they have been connubial all along. The best poems worm their way into the reader’s brain, adding their own wires and synapses. —JOHN YAU

• Language: English
• Publisher: Parlor Press, LLC
• Release date: Dec 15, 2011
• ISBN: 9781602352797

James Capozzi

AMES CAPOZZI was born in West Milford, New Jersey. He attended The College of New Jersey and The University of Texas at Austin, where he was a founding editor of Bat City Review and the recipient of a James A. Michener Fellowship. COUNTRY ALBUM is the winner of the 2010 NEW MEASURE POETRY PRIZE.

Book preview

I.

Apparently there is no limit, Joe remarked.

Anything can be said in this place

and it will be true and will have to be believed.

—Flann O’Brien

Cape Fear Canon

A song that’s a machine of sorts. A dream

I had of Us and Them, of ways in which

we need to shut Them down. All that beach

seemed poison too, until an ibis came

to me, perfecting those crude dunes like the Christ

of dunes–ivory plumage blooming in all

the ways we said it would, its rusty wail

slammed into place. It gets the last

word in, amen, but why does that word lead

above all others to this, the source,

the nest from which it never rose

up once at war within itself? Nor chose,

of course, to be like Us and stay like Us.

To die quietly in bed.

The Eureka Stockade

Our rallies had gone famously

in Ballarat and Castlemaine.

There was no power outside the people

we said, and the people agreed

an ace against searches

and the punitive price of a fossicking license.

So we made haste in those days

lashing timbers onto timbers.

Most came for the rum I am sure

but I cannot blame them–

molasses-black, it built hospitals

along the glamoured port. We posed

at the mullock cones, opal pools in

our hearts and potch thrust in our fist.

I was preparing to air this flaw in the design

when the siege appeared, creeping like disease

in an infant. It split pre-dawn apart.

Our aspiring leader spoke of the senate

as agents splintered the barricade.

The others shouldered arms

took stances we had seen in scrapbooks

or attic museums.

I remember the queer smell of my gun.

Stars began to swim

sky seeping like pitch

through gaps in our ceiling.

True West

Some patron of epic commotion

proposed it, threatening

to break across the fuming plain

into scene: hero, solo and