Machine generated contents note: 5. The Grand Design. Sunday Best -- My Mother at the Sewing Machine -- Stuffing the Birds, Carnegie Natural History Museum -- Potato Skins -- Returning the Stones -- My Father Worked 800 Hours of Overtime -- Wasting My Life, 3:00 a.m. -- The New Math -- Bahia Honda, Key West -- I Love Watching Rivers -- Fog on the Turnpike -- Hamburger Surprise -- 2. Street View -- Shouting a Sonnet into Detroit's Dead Microphone -- Searchlights -- Legendary Toads -- The Year of Burning -- Between Double Doors -- On a Personal Level -- Midnight Football -- Harlem Globetrotters, Olympia Stadium -- Abandoned School in the Rain -- Still Life with Phone Booth -- Phone Booth, Eight Mile and Ryan -- Google Maps: Street View -- 3. Gun/Shy -- Gun/Shy -- 4. Leaving the Piano Behind -- Fishing in the Cement Pond -- Strawberries and Mirrors -- My Daughter Turned Thirteen Today -- Private Room -- Test Bomb Fallout -- Poison Control -- Music of the Light Timer -- Leaving the Piano Behind -- Hale Bopp -- 5. The Grand Design -- My Mother Advises Me to Get a Mani/Pedi -- The Wound Doctor -- High School Diploma, 1917 -- Declaring Bankruptcy -- First Week Back After Stent -- Annual Checkup with Money Specialist -- Miracles -- Spanning -- The Secret Agent Briefcase -- Honorary Honor -- Property Value -- Neighbor Down on Bridge -- Empty Nest -- Ripe Serviceberries -- Tying My Shoe at the New Pornographers Concert -- Final Miracle Before Retiring from Slowpitch -- The Grand Design.
Summary:
"The poems in Gun/Shy deal with the emotional weight of making do. Tinged with both the regrets and wisdom of aging, Jim Daniels's poems measure the wages of love in a changing world with its vanishing currency. He explores the effects of family work-putting children to bed, leading parents to their final resting places-and what is lost and gained in those exertions. Childhood and adolescence are examined, through both looking back on his own childhood and on that of his children. While his personal death count rises, Daniels reflects on his own mortality. He finds solace in small miracles-his mother stretching the budget to feed five children with "hamburger surprise" and potato skins, his children collecting stones and crabapples as if they were gold coins. Daniels, as he always has, carries the anchor of Detroit with him, the weight both a comfort and a burden. He explores race, white privilege, and factory work. Eight Mile Road, a fraught border, pulses with division, and the echoes of music, singing through Detroit's soiled but solid heart, resonate in these poems. His first long poem in many years, "Gun/Shy," centers the book. Through the personas of several characters, Daniels dives into America's gun culture and the violent gulf between the fearful and the feared. Throughout, he seeks connection in likely and unlikely places: a river rising after spring rain and searchlights crossing the night sky. Comets and cloudy skies. Cement ponds and the Garden of Eden. Adolescence and death. Wounds physical and psychic. Disguises and more disguises. These are the myths we memorize to help us sleep at night, those that keep us awake and trembling. Daniels's accessible language, subtlety, and deftness make this collection one that belongs on every poetry reader's shelf"-- Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.