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    Split Horizon
    Split Horizon
    Split Horizon
    Ebook102 pages39 minutes

    Split Horizon

    By Thomas Lux

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    About this ebook

    Thomas Lux is the author of such books as Sunday, Half Promised Land, and The Drowned River. His poetry has been fulfilling every expectation by penetrating deeper into the plain-spoken, saturnine, witty language that he virtually invented. In his latest work, Lux's level gaze, cool talk, weird rhythms, and quirky humor place him in a special territory - entirely original - of contemporary American poetry. These new poems, like Split Horizon itself, have unusual titles (Loudmouth Soup, Virgule,Each Startled Touch Returns the Touch Unstartled) and circle around their subjects in strange ways, most often dealing with the lonely oddity of the individual in a society that inflexibly ignores individuality.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateApr 19, 2016
    ISBN9780544916111
    Split Horizon
    Author

    Thomas Lux

    THOMAS LUX holds the Bourne Chair in Poetry and is the director of the McEver Visiting Writers Program at Georgia Institute of Technology. He has been awarded three NEA grants and the Kingsley Tufts Award and is a former Guggenheim Fellow. He lives in Atlanta.

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      Book preview

      Split Horizon - Thomas Lux

      title page

      Contents

      Title Page

      Contents

      Copyright

      Dedication

      Epigraph

      ONE

      The People of the Other Village

      A Large Branch Splintered off a Tree in a Storm

      An Horatian Notion

      Gorgeous Surfaces

      Ditto

      Virgule

      The Neighborhood of Make-Believe

      Edgar Allan Poe Meets Sarah Hale (Author of Mary Had a Little Lamb)

      Amiel’s Leg

      Susanna Fontanarossa

      Exit 5, 3 Miles: Lord’s Valley, Grundy’s Crossing

      Cows

      Loudmouth Soup

      Endive

      Farmer Brown

      Fundamental

      Proscribed

      Frankly, I Don’t Care

      The Driver Ant

      TWO

      Job’s Problems

      The Nazi at the Puppet Show

      Kalashnikov

      The Limbic System

      Wrong Arm

      Money

      The Big Picture

      Grim Town in a Steep Valley

      Please Don’t Touch the Ruins

      Biographies

      Kleptoparasite

      River Blindness (Onchocerciasis)

      Just Curious

      History Books

      THREE: Other Voices

      Shaving the Graveyard

      Autobiographical

      On Matters Ontological and Eschatological

      Port Famine

      Pecked to Death by Swans

      The River That Scolds at All the Other Rivers

      FOUR

      Emily’s Mom

      Mr John Keats Five Feet Tall Sails Away

      Boats

      I Love You Sweatheart

      A Streak of Blood That Once Was a Tiny Red Spider

      Rhadamanthine

      Each Startled Touch Returns the Touch Unstartled

      Say Yes

      Children in School During Heavy Snowfall

      Thrombosis Trombone

      A Boat in the Forest

      Onomatopoeia

      Irony

      Glow Worm

      Eyes Examined While You Wait

      Snow as the Rain’s Father

      Notes

      About the Author

      Connect with HMH

      Copyright © 1994 by Thomas Lux

      All rights reserved

      For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to trade.permissions@hmhco.com or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

      www.hmhco.com

      The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

      Lux, Thomas, date.

      Split horizon / Thomas Lux.

      p. cm.

      ISBN 0-395-70098-1 ISBN 0-395-70097-3 (pbk)

      I. Title.

      PS3562.U87S67 1994

      811'.54—dc20 93-46333

      CIP

      eISBN 978-0-544-91611-1

      v2.0217

      The author is grateful to the editors of the following magazines for permission to reprint the following poems: Ackee: Just Curious. An American Voice: Proscribed. The Atlantic Monthly: Virgule, Gorgeous Surfaces. The American Poetry Review: The People of the Other Village, Thrombosis Trombone, Loudmouth Soup, River Blindness (Onchocerciasis), History Books, Children in School During Heavy Snowfall. Antaeus: Onomatopoeia. The Chronicle of Higher Education: Eyes Examined While You Wait. Field: A Large Branch Splintered off a Tree in a Storm, Grim Town in a Steep Valley. The Greensboro Review: A Boat in the Forest, Snow as the Rain’s Father. Gulf Coast: Kleptoparasite. The Harvard Review: A Streak of Blood That Was Once a Tiny Red Spider. The Iowa Review: Fundamental, Please Don’t Touch the Ruins. Midland Review: Pecked to Death by Swans, Glow Worm. The New Yorker: Cows. Passages North: The Driver Ant, On Matters Ontological and Eschatological, Rhadamanthine, Irony. The Personal Crucifixion: Biographies. Ploughshares: Frankly, I Don’t Care. Phoebe: Susanna Fontanarossa. The Seneca Review: Farmer Brown. Three Rivers: Amiel’s Leg. TriQuarterly: An Horatian Notion, Emily’s Mom, I Love You Sweatheart, Autobiographical. The Virginia Quarterly Review: Edgar Allan Poe Meets Sarah Hale (Author of Mary Had a Little Lamb), Shaving the Graveyard, Endive. Vox: The Nazi at the Puppet Show, Job’s Problems.

      Grim Town in a Steep Valley also appeared in Best American Poetry 1993 (Louise Glück, editor).

      Special thanks to Maria Elena Caballero-Robb and Pamela Cohn.

      —for Rachel

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