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    Accepting the Disaster: Poems
    Accepting the Disaster: Poems
    Accepting the Disaster: Poems
    Ebook77 pages31 minutes

    Accepting the Disaster: Poems

    By Joshua Mehigan

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    About this ebook

    One of The New York Times' 10 Favorite Poetry Books of 2014

    An astonishing new collection from one of our finest emerging poets

    A shark's tooth, the shape-shifting cloud drifting from a smokestack, the smoke detectors that hang, ominous but disregarded, overhead—very little escapes the watchful eye of Joshua Mehigan. The poems in Accepting the Disaster range from lyric miniatures like "The Crossroads," a six-line sketch of an accident scene, to "The Orange Bottle," an expansive narrative page-turner whose main character suffers a psychotic episode after quitting medication. Mehigan blends the naturalistic milieu of such great chroniclers of American life as Stephen Crane and Studs Terkel with the cinematic menace and wonder of Fritz Lang. Balanced by the music of his verse, this unusual combination brings an eerie resonance to the real lives and institutions it evokes.
    These poems capture with equal tact the sinister quiet of a deserted Main Street, the tragic grandiosity of Michael Jackson, the loneliness of a self-loathing professor, the din of a cement factory, and the saving grandeur of the natural world. This much-anticipated second collection is the work of a nearly unrivaled craftsman, whose first book was called by Poetry "a work of some poise and finish, by turns delicate and robust."

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateJul 1, 2014
    ISBN9780374713379
    Accepting the Disaster: Poems
    Author

    Joshua Mehigan

    Joshua Mehigan’s first book, The Optimist, was a finalist for the 2005 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry. His poems have appeared in periodicals including The New Republic, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Poetry, where he has been a frequent contributor of poems and essays. His writing has also been featured on Poetry Daily and The Writer’s Almanac, and in numerous anthologies. He is the recent recipient of Poetry magazine’s Editor’s Prize for Feature Article, and of a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Mehigan lives in New York City.

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    4.5/5

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    • 5/5
      Wonderful. Gorgeous. What modern poetry should be. I love the descriptions of small town USA.
    • 4/5
      Spare and haunting poems -- many about the everyday, e.g., payphones, smokestacks, a crossroads. He gives the reader enough to imagine and build the rest.

    Book preview

    Accepting the Disaster - Joshua Mehigan

    Here

    Nothing has changed. They have a welcome sign,

    a hill with cows and a white house on top,

    a mall and grocery store where people shop,

    a diner where some people go to dine.

    It is the same no matter where you go,

    and downtown you will find no big surprises.

    Each fall the dew point falls until it rises.

    White snow, green buds, green lawn, red leaves, white snow.

    This is all right. This is their hope. And yet,

    though what you see is never what you get,

    it does feel somehow changed from what it was.

    Is it the people? Houses? Fields? The weather?

    Is it the streets? Is it these things together?

    Nothing here ever changes, till it does.

    The Smokestack

    The town had a smokestack.

    It had a church spire.

    The church was prettier,

    but the smokestack was higher.

    It was a lone ruined column,

    a single snuffed taper,

    a field gun fired at heaven,

    a tube making vapor.

    The smoke thinned the attention.

    Its aspect kept transforming.

    It could look like a cloud, or like

    mosquitoes swarming.

    The smokestack’s bricks were yellow,

    and its mouth twenty feet wide.

    Its smoke was usually pale,

    but there was a rust color on its side.

    The smoke was yellow coral,

    a bouquet of yellow roses,

    a yellow beard, a yellow eye,

    and sometimes runny noses.

    Often it looked heavy

    like junipers under snow.

    At dawn it was limpidly pink

    and shaped like an embryo.

    It could look like

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