Birds prefer trees with dead branches…. They have complete vistas from where they perch. They can take off in any direction.
We been here before
(too many heres)
Those spinny, bitter leaves of NoWorld
Need a valid vista to get from
verso to recto
One is the onliest flyer left
(We’d all unravel twig by twig…)
Honest to God the heart aches, untied
on the margins, in gutters
Oh take off, eh?
Your lastness, as undue fealty
disappears
Fallen out of trees
Reverso time, poet
turn poesy’s leaf, pls
.
Stephen Bett
Novel Lines 101: 101 alphabetical poems. Through 101 novels and metafictions, each poem in this collection riffs, literally, on its subject texts’ opening line(s).
An innovative, sassy, but deadly and pointedly serious tour through late 20th and early 21st centuries’ fiction from the Americas and from Western, Central and Eastern Europe. A mash-up of signifiers and signifieds, numerological flakiness, and PoWorld’s bland, Mega-church hegemonies—all encountering, in the midst of our present day cocktail-hour capitalism, some of the truly great novelists of our times.
Website: StephenBett.com
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