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    The Zoo at Night

    Susan Gubernat (Author)

    9781496202055, University of Nebraska Press

    Paperback / softback, published 1 September 2017

    114 pages, none
    22.9 x 15.2 x 1 cm, 0.182 kg

    “‘Beauty is always strange,’ says Baudelaire, and in Susan Gubernat’s brilliant The Zoo at Night, we have a grand tour of the many ways that the world, arriving directly under our noses, can remain, everlastingly, embodied and mysterious.”-Mark Svenvold, author of Empire Burlesque and Big Weather
     
    “For those of us who believe in words-their merit as instruments of inquiry, their aptitude for beauty, their power of linking soul to soul-these are difficult times. Open these pages, and find your hope restored. Susan Gubernat’s are poems of meticulous craftsmanship, luminous apprehension, and unfailing heart. I’m grateful beyond measure for this book.”-Linda Gregerson, author of Magnetic North, finalist for the National Book Award
     

    Winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, Susan Gubernat’s The Zoo at Night reflects with subtle craft on the dark side of love, death, the family romance, carnality, and lofty aspirations. She thinks of her poems as “night thoughts” resembling nocturnes, in which “a bit of light leaks in.”

    Both experimental and classic, Gubernat’s poems combine formal and free verse elements. A (mostly) unrhymed sonnet sequence seeks to recall the world of a pre-digital childhood when physical objects-tactile, mechanical-took on totemic import and magical significance. Other poems echo the Rilkean principle that poetry can be empathetic by looking outward at the “thingness” of the world. 

    In these works of love and longing, Gubernat enters through the doors of craft and exits with feeling. 

    Acknowledgments

    I
    Etruscans
    Wedding Cookies
    The Right Hand of Goltzius
    I Was in Gym Class When Cronkite Said They’
    d Shot Him
    Sharing a Birthday with Mata Hari
    Atlantic City
    Smart Enough
    The Roosevelt
    Christmas Fires
    Winter Coats
    After the Abortion
    Shaggy Parasol

    II
    Analog House: A Cabinet of Curiosities
    The Singer
    Easter Bread
    Hades
    Doberman
    Meat Grinder
    Piano Bench
    13th Fairy
    Washboard
    Clothesline
    Feather Duster
    Spirit Level
    Paint-by-Number
    Net
    Netting
    Hats, Purses, Gloves
    Vestibule
    Deliberate Happiness
    Photo on Pony
    Underwood in Flames

    III
    The Zoo at Night (1)
    Aphasia of the Moon
    Sick Child
    Filia
    Poster Children
    La Sebastiana
    Portrait at Fourteen
    Ground Time
    No Warrior
    The Collective
    Deathbed Proof
    Day Lilies

    IV
    The Zoo at Night (2)
    The Entrance of Beauty
    Yellow Sweater
    Too Soon
    On a Scale Of
    Fonder
    My Sister and I Are Having the Same Dream
    Reading Loop: The Sibyl at Cumae
    Mating Dance
    Prey
    Eclipse
    The Buddhas of Bamiyan
    Our Road

    V
    “
    Report a Problem with This Poem”

    “
    Beautiful Contrivances”
    in the Sex Life of Orchids
    FumÉ
    e d’
    Ambre Gris
    The Fascicles of Emily Dickinson
    My Mother in the Eye of the Storm
    Blue Tooth
    Ground Note
    Near Capitol Reef, Utah
    Pears in Winter

    Notes
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