Fear Not

By Maurice Mierau

Fear Not is lyrical, political, raunchy, blasphemous, and deeply engaged with ethical questions. Inspired by the Gideon Bible's list of self-help topics each poem is arranged to play off poetic and Biblical forms.

Ranging in subject from suicide to divorce, unemployment to gratitude, Afghanistan to Gethsemane, Fear Not attempts consolation, all the while mocking its own failure to lessen human pain.

Mierau also surveys contemporary culture, skewering our intense involvement with pop phenomena such as America's Next Top Model and Britney Spears. He recalls the formal beauty of the Psalms with refrains that echo the debased commercial speech used to advertise iPods, Kahlua, and Cialis.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Turnstone Press
• Release date: Sep 20, 2008
• ISBN: 9780888014764

Maurice Mierau

Maurice Mierau was born in Indiana and grew up in Nigeria, Manitoba, Jamaica, Kansas, and Saskatchewan. His first book of poems, Ending with Music (Brick Books, 2002), was a finalist for the Eileen McTavish Sykes Award, and Mierau was short-listed for the John Hirsch Award for Most Promising Manitoba Author. He also won a Margaret McWilliams Award. He lives with his family in Winnipeg, where he works as a writer, editor, and teacher.

Book preview

Tempted to Commit Suicide

1How in Mel’s snuff film Jesus groans in Aramaic.

2  And yet I feel nothing.

3  So let us crucify soft flesh on the cross in a musical comedy.

4  And the Soviets murdered my grandfather in 1938, before my father’s memory begins. My grandfather did not try to run from the authorities, nor did he ride into Jerusalem on a donkey, waving a branch.

5  The earth did not shake nor did rocks split. My grandmother cut her finger on a knife. Her husband was nobody.

6  Let St. Paul himself claim to be nobody.

7  And let Ludwig say, I conduct myself badly, thinking of the children he clouted on the side of the head when he taught them mathematics. A girl sprouted blood from her ear like a trick flower, and a boy fell unconscious.

8  So my father also is detached. And my heavenly father, he has nothing to do with the farcical cruelty below him.

9  And Judas went away and hanged himself.

10  But the man who betrayed my grandfather prayed and lived long.

11  So enjoy your exotic moment responsibly.

ANXIOUS AND …

Conscious of Sin

And he would have gladly filled his stomach with the pods that the swine were eating....

—Luke 15:16

1Now he said, "A man had two sons, and

2  "on the younger son’s bicep was a Chinese character whose meaning he probably misunderstood. The tattooed son said to his father, ‘Give me the share of the estate that falls to me. Give it to me on a Visa prepaid card.’ So his father divided his wealth between the sons on two such cards, and

3  "two days later, the younger son took an airplane to Cuba, and there he squandered his Visa card on sex tourism, every last pulsing decimal.

4  "After he had spent everything, he lived on the street,

5  "reciting bits of a Lorca poem he remembered from his desultory university career.

6  "Cubans sometimes gave him a few coins so he could eat, and the prostitutes gave him pomegranate seeds until the Canadian winter was over and the tourists went home.

7  "Maria, a young woman with an iPod, took pity on him,

8  "and he would have gladly stolen her iPod except that she had taken him home, taken and fed him, all as the rains began to fall,

9  "thousands of tunes nourishing him while he ate and realized that his father’s lowliest employees were better off than he was—

10  ‘early in the morning I will get up and go to my father, and say , "Dad, I have done wrong to throw away your money from this Visa product, getting cash advances to buy Bolivian marching powder and Colombian gold, assuming free trade works as it should on this utopian island that jails poets and homosexuals;

11  "retain me as a contract worker and do not call me