21st Century Autoimmune Blues

By Brent Terry

21st Century Autoimmune Blues is multi-genre author Brent Terry's fourth collection. Terry brazenly confronts subjects that are simultaneously political and personal. The undertones range from comedic to emotional, stimulating the head, heart, and gut. Every poem in this collection hums with an underlying anxiety caused by living in these fraught and sometimes dismaying times, but Terry never fails to paint a rhythmically sound image.

 

"Brent Terry's delightful messing around in his new book, with sound, with ideas, with language, with images, it's always for a serious purpose. His poems record the things of the natural and man-made world while looking into the self, politically and with feeling. "Was there a time before beauty was ironic?" he asks. He means that, inflicting his intricate wonders with plenty of irony and wit, but also with much real, sincere beauty. These are poems of panache, energy, and just a touch of the right kind of aggression and in all the right directions. "It was the year of weird food and devastation," Terry writes. 21st Century Autoimmune Blues is about who we are, who we've been recently, and who we Americans have always been."

-- DAISY FRIED

• Language: English
• Publisher: Unsolicited Press
• Release date: Feb 11, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201292485

Book preview

21st Century Autoimmune

Blues

––––––––

Brent

Terry

Copyright © 2021 Brent Terry

All Rights Reserved

Published by Unsolicited Press

First Edition.

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

Attention schools and businesses: for discounted copies on large orders, please contact the publisher directly.

For information contact:

Unsolicited Press

Portland, Oregon

www.unsolicitedpress.com

[e-mail]

619-354-8005

Cover Design: Kathryn Gerhardt

Editor:  S.R. Stewart

Print ISBN:  978-1-950730-35-3

For Terry

I would like to thank the following fine journals for publishing some of the poems found in this book:

Spillway Magazine: Ashbery Before Bedtime

The RiseUp Review:"They Told Me I Couldn’t Write about Birds and Flowers Anymore, What with all the Injustice in the World and My Meme"

Turnip Truck(s): "The End of Wonder?"

The Undertow Review: After the Burning Bush, the First Firefly of Summer and Black is the New Black (from Monochrome Attic)

Rattle: 21st Century Autoimmune Blues and What Happens in Church

Drunken Boat: Mirage Hypothesis

Adirondack Review: Freedom Toast

Coachella Review: Rancid, Gladys

Queen Mob’s Teahouse: EDM (Ecstasy Defies Me) and Sock Hop

Spittoon: The Murder in Her He(art)

The Connecticut River Review: The Torrent Is a Harbinger 

The Ekphrastic Review: The Runners in the Snow and Nude Descending a Staircase

Scoundrel Time: Flotsam

Contents

Contents

Overture

My Heartthrob Dreams of Eden: Ars Poetica for Two Voices

Playing Tag with Gravity

They Told Me I Couldn’t Write about Birds and Flowers Anymore, What with all the Injustice in the World

Death at the Food Truck Rodeo

The End of Wonder?

They’ve Kidnapped the Muse, Apparently

After the Burning Bush, the First Firefly of Summer

The Torrent Is a Harbinger

Solstice

In the East the Runners are Rising

My Meme

1972

Oh Say Can You See? (The King of Space Disco Plays Camden Yards)

55

A Field Guide to Migratory Birds

21st Century Autoimmune Blues

The Enchantment of Blue Bamboozles

Mirage Hypothesis

The Spraycan Picassos

Gusher

Ashbery Before Bedtime

Pan-Olympic

Asian Fusion Cuisine (Or: Takeout Meets its Match in Young Jack Spratt)

EDM (Ecstasy Defies Me)

Monochrome Attic #1

crimson, no clover

Cabin Fever (Sculpture Garden in Security Light)

True Bride

Rancid, Gladys

Freedom Toast

In Cambridge, Maybe

Aurora Borealis

The Razorteeth of Newsfeed

Hotel Ashbery

Sock Hop

Note to Self

Racial Profiling for Dummies

The Runners in the Snow

What Happens in Church

On Encountering a Rack of Hogwarts Panties at Target the Husband Has an Existential Crisis

Live Model at the Salon for Abject Expressionists

Nude Descending a Staircase

Carbon Taxing

God Particle

Flotsam

Coda: The Murder in Her He(art)

The Murder in her He(art)

About the Author

About the Press

Overture

My Heartthrob Dreams of Eden: Ars Poetica for Two Voices

(A [Whit]Manic Episode)

I am a Kosmos caught in a songbird’s trill.

I speak from strands of chlorophyll.

Voodoo ventriloquist, I throw my voice

under the bus, embrace the crush,

bash my verbiage into Babel, brouhaha, birdseed for the beaks

of a million

mockingbirds.   

Murder

and murmuration, I travel on the tongues

of the hungry hordes, the bleats of kids,

the honks of Fords.   

I lick the flowers