Vice: New and Selected Poems
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Winner of the 1999 National Book Award for Poetry.Library JournalAis poems provide an absorbing, gritty anatomy of desire you cannot satisfy. In this selection of 18 new poems and 58 from five previous books published from 1973 to 1993, agents of emotional and mental abuse describe horrific journeys into malice and the old fear. Transfigured by desire, speakers (a heroin addict, a paparazzo, a racist) who take extreme measures try to unravel the strands of equivocal motivation. What I always wanted/ was release from my own pain/ but theres only the terrible surrender to it, confesses the police officer who committed suicide before he was to receive a medal for rescuing people after the Oklahoma City bombing. Ais willingness to explore moral values in collision shines into the hearts of those doomed to be crushed. In Ice and Rwanda, she highlights the dignity and suffering of ordinary women, victims of inexplicable violence. Redemptive empathy transforms these unadorned narratives into documents that reveal the intense disintegration of body and soul. Richly rewarding, but not for the squeamish.Frank Allen, Northampton Community Coll., Tannersville, PA
Twenty-Year Marriage3Abortion4The Country Midwife: A Day5Cruelty6The Tenant Farmer7Why Can't I Leave You?8I Have Got to Stop Loving You9Young Farm Woman Alone10One Man Down11Hangman12The Sweet13The Hitchhiker14Cuba, 196215Child Beater16Everything: Eloy, Arizona, 195617Killing Floor21Nothing but Color24Talking to His Reflection in a Shallow Pond2729 (A Dream in Two Parts)29She Didn't Even Wave30Ice32The Ravine34The Kid36I Can't Get Started38Pentecost40The Gilded Man42Two Brothers47Blue Suede Shoes52The Prisoner58Conversation61More63The Good Shepherd: Atlanta, 198165The Mother's Tale67The Priest's Confession69Elegy74The Testimony of J. Robert Oppenheimer77The Detective80The Journalist85Go93Jimmy Hoffa's Odyssey97Boys and Girls, Lenny Bruce, or Back from the Dead102General George Armstrong Custer: My Life in the Theater107Interview with a Policeman110James Dean113Reunions with a Ghost116Capture118Evidence: From a Reporter's Notebook122The Cockfighter's Daughter129Riot Act, April 29, 1992137Hoover, Edgar J.140Hoover Trismegistus145Jack Ruby on Ice149Oswald Incognito & Astral Travels156Miracle in Manila161Finished165Life Story168Penis Envy176Greed180Rapture189False Witness192Sleeping Beauty196Charisma199The Antihero201Rwanda206Stalking Memory210The Paparazzi213Afterschool Lessons from a Hitman215Chance218Knock, Knock220Blood in the Water223Back in the World226Flashback230Momento Mori237Visitation240Star Vehicle (My Senior Year in High School)242Passing Through247Index253
