Details

Subject(s)

• Prose poems, American [Browse]

Series

Phoenix poets. [More in this series]

Summary note

In the appropriately titled Mean, Colette LaBouff Atkinson's speakers confront a series of cruel lovers, estranged ex-husbands and ex-ex-wives, neglectful parents, disrespectful children, menacing drunks, would-be rapists, well-meaning but ineffectual teachers, and that annoying kid in first grade who wouldn't leave you alone. Managing to "say" what most of us would only think but never dare speak out loud, this stunning debut collection reveals that the horrors and cruelty we experience in everyday life can turn out to be very real indeed. But Atkinson does not merely rake her subjects across the coals: she deftly exposes, instead, how the world mirrors back to us our own meanness, lending it a truth and a history. In forty-three deadpan, often merciless prose poems that are masterpieces of the form, Mean lays bare the darkness within the narrator's heart as well as in ours. "Colette Labouff Atkinson's artful laconicism attains the force of a shout, without ever raising its voice. The intelligent, merciless narrative cool arrays a sad comedy, with an unemphatic but penetrating 'and then . . . and then': accounts of love pursued far more often than it is glimpsed or realized."-Robert Pinsky

Notes

Description based upon print version of record.

Language note

English

Contents

• Frontmatter
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Space Race
• Mean
• Mean, Part Two
• Medium Intense Red Copper
• Rocket
• Loose
• Heat Wave
• Hart Crane Slept Here
• Four
• London (1987)
• Wrecking
• Three Days of the Condor
• The Glass Show Lounge
• Bakasana
• Deal
• "I'm sorry I was blind"
• Hover
• Intention (The Dead Leaves)
• Gain
• Spring Fling
• New World
• Laurel
• Replacement Monkey
• Spirit
• Proximity
• Juju's Sister
• Gun Dog
• Flower Girl
• Park Bench
• "Perhaps this verse would please you better-Sue-(2)"
• Prosthetic
• Garden Variety
• "For God's sake, get out"
• Route
• 1652
• Graphic Novel Romance (V for Vendetta)
• Ghost Squad
• Hips
• 1971
• Port of Los Angeles
• "Taking it like a little soldier, aren't you?"
• Fortune-Telling
• Gardena Freeway, California
• Notes

Show 44 more Contents items

ISBN

• 1-282-53767-9
• 9786612537677
• 0-226-03060-1

OCLC

• 593274211
• 748211750

Doi

• 10.7208/9780226030609

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