darkacre

Two literary posts in a row, when all you want to do is read about histrionics. So sorry (they might be fading). Last evening, at Common Good Books in St. Paul, I had the good fortune to hear excellent poet, English professor at Carleton and friend Greg Hewett read from his latest volume of poems. darkacre is not necessarily easy reading, but much of what I've read thus far is so well-structured and full of satisfying imagery that I'm easily lost in it. From a set of poems titled The Structure of Crisis, his poem about New Orleans, Consolation on Pipeline, resonates particularly today, given the gross horror we see oozing from the Gulf of Mexico's ripped-up floor. I can't share the entire work, and you can just go to a bookstore or here and buy the volume for yourself, but the opening is worth committing to memory:

Sometimes all you want to do is lean
your tired frame against the last post
still upright in the charred settlement
of your life, only the wood is mottled
red with embers and scraps of flame twist
at your feet. Hope zigzags off
to the bruised horizon
like it had been constructed
only to offer perspective.

Hewett, Greg. "Consolation on Pipeline." darkacre. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2010.