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"Between the Crackups" is a frolicking romp through the abandoned factories, overcrowded highways, and forgotten rural landscapes of America. This provocatively voiced book explores themes of sexuality, gender, class, pop-culture, and aesthetics. Some of these poems are sonnets, some are multi-voiced elegies, others are meditations on loss. From the balmy swamps of Florida, to the snowed-in forests of northern Wisconsin, and back again, Rebecca Lehmann captures a feeling of cultural unease and personal panic in tight, smartly worded poems that banter casually with the tropes, traditions, and authors of the Western poetic canon. In the book, the Old English poem "The Dream of the Rood" is re-imagined as a two-part, modern-day fever dream, the classic pastoral landscape morphs into an apple orchard occupied by off-putting children, and the entire season of autumn goes missing. Part serious meditation and part carnival fun house, these poems will make the reader chortle, chuckle, snort, and maybe even blush.
List of contents
- Between the Crackups
- I. The Devil Is In Detroit
- A Hundred Words For Loser
- Letters To A Shithead Friend
- Bucolic Calling
- The Youngest Girls In Memphis
- To Feed And Water Ourselves And Others
- The End Of The World
- Muster Lovely
- Pterodactyl Eye Chart
- My Father's Fourth Tooth
- The Factory, An Elegy In Six Parts
- 1. The Managers
- 2. Call And Response
- 3. Managerial Meeting
- 4. Randall's Lament
- 5. A Trial Is A Way To Find Guilt
- 6. Memo To All Workers
- The Devil Is In Detroit
- II. Think Georgia, Gorgeous
- My Mister's Eyes
- A Dream Of The Rood
- A Dream Of The Rood
- Think Georgia, Gorgeous
- Ten Bells Tell
- The New Town
- Front Yard Regatta
- Let's Go To The Party
- One Morning I Wake Up
- Lands End
- Something Very Woman
- 1/()()=0
- North Florida Rain
- Look At The Tree
- III. The Poem Is The Story
- A Gun In The First Act
- Someone Has Sent A Letter
- Year, Years A-Sparkle
- Under Vision Walls
- Dear Cousin
- Particulate Matter
- The History Of Yesterday
- For Posterity
- Has Anyone Seen Autumn?
- The Poem Is The Story (1)
- The Poem Is The Story (2)
- The Poem Is The Story (3)
- The Poem Is The Story (4)
- The Poem Is The Story (5)
- Pasture
About the author
Rebecca Lehmann lives with her husband in Wisconsin, USA. Her poems have been published in
Tin House,
The Iowa Review,
The Gettysburg Review,
Best New Poets 2010, and other journals and magazines.
Summary
Between the Crackups is a frolicking romp through the abandoned factories, overcrowded highways, and forgotten rural landscapes of America. Part serious meditation and part carnival fun house, these poems will make the reader chortle, chuckle, snort, and maybe even blush.
