The White Book
poems by Alex Grant
ISNBN 13: 978-1-59948-126-5,
Poetry chapbook, ~40 pages, $10Projected release date: April 28
***Advance discount purchase price of $7 will be available until April 14, 2008.*** (subject to change without notice)
Still Under Construction
Alex Grant's book Chains & Mirrors (NCWN/Harperprints) won the 2006 Randall Jarrell Poetry Prize and the 2007 Oscar Arnold Young Award (best collection by a North Carolina poet.) He received Kakalak's 2006 Poetry Prize and WMSU's 2004 Pavel Srut Poetry Fellowship, and has been a recent runner-up or finalist for Discovery/The Nation, The Pablo Neruda and the Arts & Letters Poetry Prizes, and The Dorset, Brittingham, Felix Pollak, Tupelo Open and Lena-Miles Wever Todd book Prizes, among others. His poems have appeared or are upcoming in numerous national journals and anthologies, including Meridian's Best New Poets 2007. A native Scot, he lives in Chapel Hill, NC, with his wife Tristi, his dangling participles and his Celtic fondness for excess.
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Brilliant. Alex Grant has a weird and fascinating mind. In The White Book, he combines a glittering sardonic wit with a sort of punch-drunk fatalistic spirituality to produce poems that "swing...on lengths of radiant silk."
-- Joanna Catherine Scott
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HAMISH SAMEY'S TURNIP SOUP
My Grandfather's neck would bulge
with veins thick as a horse's cock
when he swung the axe to the wood,
the thunk of metal on rings
cracking the morning air.
Wood flung on the fire,
flames swept upward
in the huge fart of the leather bellows,
screaming sparks crackling
up the black chimney.Dark days, indeed, made bearable
only by the thick turnip soup
my Grandmother cauldron-boiled
over the wet peat heaved
from sullen bogs. Fat shards of pepper
would float like frog-spawn
in the turgid brew, daring
the faint-hearted to slurp down
the lung-sticking potage.
No stranger to daring myself,
I gobbled the turnip innards
like a starving goat in a midden.O, red and purple-veined vegetable,
I stand before you now,
in this suburban supermarket,
consider your heft and proportions,
shiny, bulbous and stippled, waxy,
like my Grandmother's skin, purple
as my Grandfather's nose.
RESURRECTION
Death is not the worst evil
Sophocles
Lazarus, raised from mediocrity,
moves to a small desert town.
Mornings, he chases
his kibbutznik anonymity
behind the goat-herd's
clattering hooves, watches
the Juniper leaves tear
the sky like green stigmata,
holds the white pistils
of un-named flowers
in his pristine hands --
cupped and cuneiform,
capable of holding universes.
Nights, he takes the moon
down through the trees, bends
his fingers around its halo,
presses his thumbs
into its tearless crater eyes --
suffer, you bastard,
he thinks -- suffer.
FREQUENT EXISTENTIALIST
Wheels down in New Hampshire (state motto:
"Exact change saves time.") Had a snorter
and a sniffer sitting kitty-corner, side by side,(she, mid-life Malaysian mama -- he, Generation
Z network support dude.) Suspect number three,
to my immediate right, is reading Communionwith The Lord and appears to have renounced
the arch-demon of deodorant and all his diabolic
works. I settle my head on the fuselage skin, flashon fifties factories stamping out pink plastic
lampshades under banks of fluorescent lights.
I'm beginning to feel like Jean-Paul Sartrewith a hangover -- and you, Simone, a thousand
miles away in a Carolina kitchen, pour egg-yolks
on a blue plate, small suns splattering china sky.
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