Bicentennial Poems |
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Author:
| Chiasson, Dan |
ISBN: | 978-0-385-34981-9 |
Publication Date: | Mar 2014 |
Publisher: | Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
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Imprint: | Knopf |
Book Format: | Hardback |
List Price: | USD $26.95USD $26.95 |
Book Description:
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From the acclaimed poet-recipient of a Whiting Writers Award and an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters-a refreshing, singular collection of poems about boys and boyhood, historical cycles and personal history, memory and meaning.
Bicentennialis, in the poet's words- "full of the things a boy growing up when and where I did-Vermont in the seventies-experienced- early VCRs, snow, erections, pizza, snowmobiles, high-school cliques, the...
More DescriptionFrom the acclaimed poet-recipient of a Whiting Writers Award and an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters-a refreshing, singular collection of poems about boys and boyhood, historical cycles and personal history, memory and meaning.
Bicentennialis, in the poet's words- "full of the things a boy growing up when and where I did-Vermont in the seventies-experienced- early VCRs, snow, erections, pizza, snowmobiles, high-school cliques, the Bicentennial celebration...but my book is also an elegy for my father, whom I never knew, and who died in 2009." In these poems Chiasson movingly revisits the kind of autobiographical poems he wrote as a young man, but with a new existential awareness that individuals are always vanishing in time, and throughout the collection he ponders time's conundrums; "All of history, even the Romans,/ they happen later, tonight sleep tight," he tells his sons at bedtime. "You'll learn this later. Tonight, goodnight." In the topsy-turvy world ofBicentennial, history has both happened and is waiting to happen; boys grow up to be men; men never forget what it is to be boys; and fatherhood is the best answer to fatherlessness.