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Northeast Iowa Community College
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Smith, Austin, author.
Subjects
Violence -- Poetry.
Manners and customs
Rural conditions
Violence
United States -- Rural conditions
Middle West
United States -- Social life and customs
Middle West
United States
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by author:
Smith, Austin, author.
by title:
Flyover country : po...
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Flyover country : poems / Austin Smith.
by
Smith, Austin, author.
Princeton : Princeton University Press, [2018]
Series:
Princeton series of contemporary poets.
Description:
viii, 112 pages ; 24 cm.
Contents:
To go to Lena -- I. Into the corn -- Fences -- The raccoon tree -- Cat moving kittens -- Beyond Mirror Lake -- The windbreak -- American glue factory -- Chekhov -- Three radios -- Hired hands -- Water witching -- Apparition of knives -- Scrapper Kevin -- The vampire -- Building a temple for the field mice -- Father and son: Barcelona -- Grasshoppers -- Some haiku found scrawled in the margins of The old farmer's almanac -- II. The mechanic's children -- The Shaker abecedarius -- The streets of Turn -- Outside the Anne Frank House -- The crutches of Lourdes -- The only tavern in Hyde, Wisconsin -- The spider -- Factory town -- Street performer: Asheville, North Carolina -- The bow -- Cottonpicker -- Atomic fireball -- Soap operas -- The blind -- The bombing of hospitals -- Wounded men seldom come home to die -- Elegy for Thomas Merton -- Premature elegy for Claude Eatherly -- We defy augury -- The man without oxen trembles -- Swatting flied -- That particular villages -- Drone -- The witness tree. III. Cicadas -- Flyover country -- White lie -- The capacity of speech -- N Judah -- Break in the weather -- Dead dogs -- Growing cold -- Lament of the man who picks up dead animals -- Country things -- Ode to flour -- Things we don't often think of -- Film of the Building of a coffin viewed in reverse -- The twain -- Feathers -- The light at the end.
Summary:
Flyover Country is a powerful collection of poems about violence: the violence we do to the land, to animals, to refugees, to the people of distant countries, and to one another. Drawing on memories of his childhood on a dairy farm in Illinois, Austin Smith explores the beauty and cruelty of rural life, challenging the idea that the American Midwest is mere "flyover country," a place that deserves passing over. At the same time, the collection suggests that America itself has become a flyover country, carrying out drone strikes and surveillance abroad, locked in a state of perpetual war that Americans seem helpless to stop. In these poems, midwestern barns and farmhouses are linked to other lands and times as if by psychic tunnels. A poem about a barn cat moving her kittens in the night because they have been discovered by a group of boys resonates with a poem about the house in Amsterdam where Anne Frank and her family hid from the Nazis. A poem beginning with a boy on a farmhouse porch idly swatting flies ends with the image of people fleeing before a drone strike. A poem about a barbwire fence suggests, if only metaphorically, the debate over immigration and borders. Though at times a dark book, the collection closes with a poem titled "The Light at the End," suggesting the possibility of redemption and forgiveness. Building on Smith's reputation as an accessible and inventive poet with deep insights about rural America, Flyover Country also draws profound connections between the Midwest and the wider world.
Genre:
Poetry
Poetry
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Peosta Library
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811.6 Smi
2018
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