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    In a Few Minutes Before Later
    In a Few Minutes Before Later
    In a Few Minutes Before Later
    Ebook203 pages1 hour

    In a Few Minutes Before Later

    By Brenda Hillman

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    About this ebook

    Finalist for the Four Quartets Prize, given by Poetry Society of America, 2023

    An iconoclastic ecopoet who has led the way for many young and emerging artists, Brenda Hillman continues to re-cast innovative poetic forms as instruments for tracking human and non-human experiences. At times the poet deploys short dialogues, meditations or trance techniques as means of rendering inner states; other times she uses narrative, documentary or scientific materials to record daily events during a time of pandemic, planetary crisis, political and racial turmoil. Hillman proposes that poetry offers courage even in times of existential peril; her work represents what is most necessary and fresh in American poetry.


    During an enchantment in the life


    Do you love a living person
            absolutely? Tell them now.
    In a half-unwieldy life you made, under
    the hyaline sky, while the dead
            drank from zigzag pools nearby,
    if they saved you in your wild incapacities,

            in timing of the world's harm
    in a little pettiness in your own heart while others took
            your madrigals in shreds to a tribunal,
            when others said you should feel grateful
            to be minimally adequate for the world's
    triple exposure or some tired committee...

            The ones who love us, how do they
    break through our defenses?
            We're tired today. Come back later.
    Their baffled voices melting our wax walls
    with a candle, the ones who understand
    what being is—the glowing, the broken,

    the wheels, the brave ones—
            they have their courage,
    you have yours,,,;
            when you meet the one you love,
    it is so rare. When you meet
    the one who loves you, it is extremely rare.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWesleyan University Press
    Release dateOct 4, 2022
    ISBN9780819500229
    In a Few Minutes Before Later
    Author

    Brenda Hillman

    Brenda Hillman is the author of 11 books of poetry from Wesleyan University Press. She has co-edited numerous books, including At Your Feet by Brazilian poet Ana Cristina Cesar. A former Chancellor at the Academy of American Poets and a recent recipient of the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for innovation in literature, she is Professor Emerita at Saint Mary’s College of California and lives in the Bay Area with her husband Robert Hass.

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      In a Few Minutes Before Later - Brenda Hillman

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