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    Valuing: Poems
    Valuing: Poems
    Valuing: Poems
    Ebook72 pages1 hour

    Valuing: Poems

    By Christopher Kondrich

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    About this ebook

    In his second collection, Christopher Kondrich navigates the link between what we see as our inner value and the external world that supplies it. Valuing’s deeply personal poems explore faith, love, ethics, and mortality from a variety of angles and through a variety of poetic forms as a means of questioning the origination of one’s own value system. Does it come from the belief in a god, from the love one gives or receives, or from the diminution of the self and its desires? If “you cannot sneak through your life,” as the speaker of one of Valuing’s poems proclaims, then how might one ensure that the noise a life inevitably makes is an echo of the values one holds dear?
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Georgia Press
    Release dateSep 15, 2019
    ISBN9780820355719
    Valuing: Poems
    Author

    Christopher Kondrich

    CHRISTOPHER KONDRICH is the author of Contrapuntal and a winner of the Iowa Review Award for Poetry and the Paris-American Reading Series Prize. His poetry appears or is forthcoming in the Believer, Boston Review, Conjunctions, Crazyhorse, Harvard Review, Iowa Review, Kenyon Review, Witness, and other publications. An associate editor for 32 Poems, he lives and works in Maryland.

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      Book preview

      Valuing - Christopher Kondrich

      Asylum

      I choose to love the dawn; it speaks

      in light. Long had its silence

      silenced me. I choose to love this table

      where I lie, the instruments that tell me

      what I am made of. I am made

      of things I love: the onlookers

      peering over, trying to find some

      what of them, maybe a gem or pencil

      they once held. Maybe a vein

      like their veins. Or their sleep.

      I choose to love our auspices

      because they brought us here, to love

      disobedience because it shows the freedom

      to love or not love. Or value. I choose

      to value. I choose to love

      as asylum from that which presses me

      to hate. This body, which is not

      a body. This representation, which is all

      there is. I have a choice in the matter.

      To touch you, I choose my hands.

      Dwelling

      It is alright. You may dwell in me. I am the conflagration

      of the never-at-home and the never-not-at-home that makes you

      part of the history of people. And though I have no holdings,

      you may increase your stock in me;

      you may reserve the right to vessel. To partition if you need to.

      To live amongst walls and proclaim those walls a home. Even now

      I have already clothed you in vanishing

      numbers, which as they rise cluster in your not being

      able to picture them as they are. Able to picture me without

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