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    The Hotel Oneira: Poems
    The Hotel Oneira: Poems
    The Hotel Oneira: Poems
    Ebook82 pages1 hour

    The Hotel Oneira: Poems

    By August Kleinzahler

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    About this ebook

    A thrilling new collection from one of the most original poets of his generation

    "His work is a modernist swirl of sex, surrealism, urban life and melancholy with a jazzy backbeat." That praise appeared in the pages of The New York Times in 2005, but it applies no less to August Kleinzahler's newest collection.
    Kleinzahler's poetry is, as ever, concerned with permeability: Voices, places, the real and the dreamed, the present and the past, all mingle together in verses that always ring true. Whether the poem is three lines long or spans several pages; whether the voice embodied is that of "an adult male of late middle age, // about to weep among the avocados and citrus fruits / in a vast, overlit room next to a bosomy Cuban grandma" as in "Whitney Houston," or that of the title character in "Hootie Bill Do Polonius," who is bidding "adios compadre // To a most galuptious scene Kid"—Kleinzahler finds the throbbing human heart at the core of experience.
    This is a poet searching for—and finding—a cadence to suit life as it's lived today. Kleinzahler's verses are, as noted in the judges' citation for the 2004 Griffin Poetry Prize (which he won for his collection The Strange Hours Travelers Keep), "ferociously on the move, between locations, between forms, between registers." The Hotel Oneira finds Kleinzahler at his shape-shifting, acrobatic best, unearthing the "moments of grace" buried under the detritus of our hectic, modern lives.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateJul 8, 2014
    ISBN9780374713331
    The Hotel Oneira: Poems
    Author

    August Kleinzahler

    August Kleinzahler was born in Jersey City, New Jersey, in 1949. He is the author of more than a dozen books of poems and a memoir, Cutty, One Rock. His collection The Strange Hours Travelers Keep was awarded the 2004 Griffin Poetry Prize, and Sleeping It Off in Rapid City won the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry. That same year he received a Lannan Literary Award. He lives in San Francisco.

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      Book preview

      The Hotel Oneira - August Kleinzahler

      THE HOTEL ONEIRA

      That was heavy freight moved through last night,

      and has been moving through since I’m back,

      settled in again by the Hudson at the Hotel Oneira:

      maps on the walls, shelves of blue and white Pelicans,

      multiple editions of the one epistolary novel by K.,

      the curios—my sediment, you mighty say, my spattle trail.

      Look at them down there by the ferry slip,

      the bridal party, organza, chiffon and lace, beside themselves,

      being wonderful, desperately wonderful, a pastel foam.

      Behind them a tug pushes a rusted barge upriver.

      Helicopters, small planes, passenger jets above.

      They behave, these girls, as if this is their last chance to be thus.

      You can feel the rumble of the trains

      vibrating up the steel of the hotel’s frame.

      They move only very late at night, from three or so until dawn,

      north along the river and then west.

      There is going on just now a vast shifting of inventory

      from the one place to another. I can feel it, inside my head.

      I find myself going down there, late, behind the highway,

      at the base of the cliffs, where the track runs.

      Last night, what at first looked like a giant coelacanth

      strapped to a flatbed rattled slowly past,

      but it was merely the enfoldings of a tarp catching the streetlight.

      I remember Uncle Istvan at the lake, unaccountably.

      This has been going on quite a lot since I’m here.

      How is it that I remember him? I saw him but the one

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