We Want for More -- A Great Damage -- A Little Push -- Gooseflesh -- Naming -- Time to Clean -- The Rational Optimist. -- They Sing Her Praises -- Climate of Destruction -- Dreaming and What-ifs -- Backseat Scores -- Daily Ghosts -- We Were Complicit -- Torn and Useless -- Recurring Catastrophes -- Between Pleasure and Worry. -- A True Believer.. -- To Feed and Stoke a Fire -- A Clean, Level Plane -- Her Terror is Palpable -- A Necessary Lesson -- That Worn Joke (It Cuts and Bleeds) -- Stop Her Before She Speaks -- Patterns We've Sought -- Beauty in Sameness -- Beneath These Waves -- We Must Be Ruthless -- Let Others Create -- The Coin Lands Here -- Between Past and Future -- To Escape This Trap -- With Every Disappointment -- I Make a Fractured Promise -- Her Blandness is Camouflage -- It is Difficult to Say the Word -- Eventually Bodies Tire -- More Fanatic than True Practitioner -- A Feast for Some Other Being -- The First Real Darkness -- My Heart, Not Hers (And Not Hers Either) -- Neither Here Nor There -- Useless Masks -- We Can't Have Everything -- To Be Present and Enjoy -- Despite My Schisms and Rifts.. -- They Will Not Be Moved -- Doubt and Awe -- An Absurd Lament -- A Moment That Shouldn't Exist -- Something That Must Remove -- Knowing Failure -- The Value of Pain and Spectacle -- This is What We Chose -- No Satisfactory Answer -- A Greater, Deeper Need -- Authors of Their Own Sad Ends -- A Pendulum's Swing -- A New Language -- An Uneasy Ceasefire -- Destroyed, Not Reused -- Kill or Be Killed -- Then Where Would We Be? -- Move It Or Lose It -- The Gang's All Here! -- Her Shape Flickers and Shifts -- Like a Knife Fraying Rope -- Our Decline and Decay -- Every Action Chose This Moment -- The Joke and All Its Implications -- Wisdom Exacts Its Price -- Learning Patience -- Everything More Extreme -- Shifting and Inscrutable. -- Bedlam and Buffoonery -- Goodbye To What Has Been -- Flat Chalk Slates -- Notes -- Acknowledgments.
Summary:
""'The feminists lied,' she tells me. 'They said we could do everything / we wanted.' 'Anything,' I correct her." A book-length narrative in poems, The Familiar explores female mid-life existential crisis through two characters: the Ordinary Self and the Extraordinary Self. A true homebody, satisfied with routine and the comforts of domesticity, the Ordinary Self wakes one day to find that while she's been sleeping - for months? for years? - the Extraordinary Self has wreaked havoc in a blind, desperate attempt to accomplish something - anything - truly great. As the Ordinary Self works to reestablish harmony and order within the household, the Extraordinary Self must come to terms with her failure to meet both the ambitions of her youth and the standards that society has set for her as a mother, as a colleague, and as a spouse. Fabulist and absurdist, The Familiar features a mix of high and low language, philosophy, and pop culture while exploring the effects of second and third-wave feminism. It's a book for anyone who's vacillated between dreams, desires, and ambition on the one hand, and on the other a deeply ingrained need for stability and calm. It's a book for anyone who may be approaching or going through mid-life and thinking, "Oh no. What have I done?""-- 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.