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    Parallel Resting Places: Poems
    Parallel Resting Places: Poems
    Parallel Resting Places: Poems
    Ebook79 pages1 hour

    Parallel Resting Places: Poems

    By Laura Wetherington

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    About this ebook

    What happens when a poet tries to filter the untranslatable from another language? The rush of unknowing, decoding the wind, the body becomes an antenna. Following behind Jack Spicer's After Lorca and swinging its ovaries, Laura Wetherington's second book uses the concept of translation to create original poems from the work of writers like Liliane Giraudon, Marie Étienne, Dominique Fourcade, and Jean-Marie Gleize. These poems run through a liminal linguistic space where meaning, mishearing, and dreams collide, sometimes midsentence, where they hinge into song: "My man animal took shape in a shadow, / climbed over an obstacle, / became the void." Interstitial love letters to queer writers process a miscarriage, the most recent election, and queer puppy love. This is a book of yearning—for a foreign tongue, for a body growing inside the body, and for a form of communication that can capture feeling.
    "There is a constant textual drama in the address and voice of Laura Wetherington’s heady poems; a mirror staged. With monologues, letters, lyrics, and prose she performs a writing through to a new ground of sensation and thinking. Call it the present. The music is gorgeous and the sound is captivating. Parallel Resting Places is a wonderful book and a welcome addition to a tradition that troubles tradition." —Peter Gizzi
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherParlor Press, LLC
    Release dateJan 1, 2021
    ISBN9781643171920
    Parallel Resting Places: Poems
    Author

    Laura Wetherington

    Laura Wetherington’s first book, A Map Predetermined and Chance, was selected by C.S. Giscombe for the National Poetry Series. She published a chapbook with Bateau Press, chosen by Arielle Greenberg for the Keel Hybrid Competition. Her work appears in Narrative, Michigan Quarterly Review, Colorado Review, FENCE, and VOLT, among others, and in three anthologies, The Sonnets: Translating and Rewriting Shakespeare (Nightboat Books), Choice Words: Writers on Abortion (Haymarket Books), and 60 Morning Talks (Ugly Duckling Presse).

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      Book preview

      Parallel Resting Places - Laura Wetherington

      The body free falls through history, memorializing the seventies

      after Dominique Fourcade

      My body, made

      from language,

      touching your tongue.

      Every word in

      an accidental affair.

      I blame

      the heat of the sentence.

      I blame each chance—

      a broad opening

      in common with inhalation—

      I. No more nature poems*

      A poem should always have birds in it.

      —Mary Oliver

      bird poems

      The book is a mirror

      after Carole Darricarrère

      I.

      One must look at a book

      as though it is a small faith.

      The bird-book, in spectrum, glimmers—

      bird-book’s field of vision

      unknots a blue voice: supple timbre

      stirring up inskinuations.

      Within: each bird illuminated—

      what no gentle boy could hold in his hand for long—

      the world performed in absentia—

      II.

      Sudden heat marks a prayer on the bird-body.

      Not for one moment the memory of eternal summer.

      We pray a bird-book, its dust jackets fluttering,

      holding open the possibility that

      our bodies bathe against and

      ending in a comma is a kind of grace that

      makes a circle of all the questions.

      Dear Hannah,

      When we move to the woods to start our free skool, we’ll take a big screen TV and some way of streaming ESPN because, you know, college football and women’s basketball. I’ve been hoarding extension cords just in case not all the buildings have power. (Our school will have buildings, right?)

      Remember the guy from Portland, Maine who camped out in a crosswalk dressed as a tree? He’s totally invited. How did he explain it? He wanted to understand how his performance would impact people’s natural choreography. His tree performance is to nature poetry what the History Channel is to history. I love it so much. But seriously, do you think he’s read Cage’s writings?

      When I tried to explain to my husband how I’m not heavily invested in nature poems, I said, I don’t really need to gaze into a deer’s eyes, you know? and he replied, What if it’s a queer deer? and I’ve never loved a man more.—He comes too.

                   Love,

                   Laura

      I’m a religious delicate

      after Francis Picabia

      Sometimes we think

      responsibility involves only

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