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    Quite Apart
    Quite Apart
    Quite Apart
    Ebook96 pages31 minutes

    Quite Apart

    By Krystal Languell

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    About this ebook

    Quite Apart asks “what about after survival?” in a chronicle of attempts to have a heart in a rough world. Haunted by work and its wasted hours, the book offers a glimpse of self-rendered as subtext beneath the sheen of productivity. Inventive formal poems provide a kind of alibi, mirroring the inflexibility of the environment—driving through mountains, bleeding in alleys, losing keys in a bar parking lot—to allow some emotion to pass through, tenderness intact.


    The action among forms of address moves across the sections from direct to readerly, to more distant, back to the last/lost sequence, and ultimately into an intimate direct address, which builds up a reserve of trust adequate to collapse the distance of a cool operator. Mediated by grammatical invention, the collection enacts the making of an authentic place and self, reckoning with difficult truths (failures, omissions) to arrive at a state of peace having weathered some storms. It returns to a core and singular perspective, a knowing eye, that captures absurdity and tragedy, the absurdity of tragedy, to find—beyond vigilance—a balance between acceptance and bucking, which is perhaps another name for love.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Akron Press
    Release dateApr 22, 2019
    ISBN9781629221441
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      Book preview

      Quite Apart - Krystal Languell

      Yau

      Invocation

      Poem for My Friend in Philadelphia

      By the end of summer, all the decisions

      & all the interring, the full shift to open

      air will be complete. What it means. You

      recall an old dog, muscle past concrete.

      The elements conspire, eject their effluvia,

      the burst zit of some creature ruins a nice

      moment & we put our sunglasses on.

      Show me that lighter thing again.

      Poem for My Friend in Providence

      Do you sometimes feel as if motherhood

      is wielded against us? What used to gird me

      changed. The big lightbulbs—one, two, three—

      foreground honeycomb tiles. I wake up

      with a start & nothing is wrong. A field is no

      place to panic. The amulet of clarity you gave me:

      what am I doing with it? Congratulations

      never last. An amethyst at the beach. Your

      needle & thread. We can die trying.

      Poem for My Friend in Los Angeles

      That you’ve found your name someplace

      it doesn’t belong, I regret with you.

      The scope of gratitude expands so wide

      to pre-empt future criticism, inclusive

      and ungenerous. And what part

      of a list of names is afterthought?

      Go alphabetical, camouflage hierarchy.

      Didn’t you ring people up at Target

      for 12 months to get onto a man’s margin?

      I know you’re no feather.

      Poem for My Friend in Montreal

      Escalator. When carrots still taste sweet,

      I know my tongue is clean. It’s official.

      The paternoster at the Ministry spun

      on its chain & I was too afraid to enter

      its open compartments. Its beauty—

      the frequency with which one can leap

      off, cease rising (or descending). A

      stomachache at Middlesex Guildhall.

      A pause: English lavender with maple

      & charcuterie on your terrace. A grief.

      Poem for My Friend in Kansas

      Are you waiting? The controlled experiment

      can fail in spite of its correct plan. Next

      time we’ll walk the downtown mall slowly.

      You’ll inherit a lot of diamonds & I will

      hang a shadow box displaying scrimshaw.

      The gifts travel toward us right now &

      you hear yours before you see it. That soft

      putter—such a pure stone—is coming closer.

      Poem for My Friend in Ohio

      I am glad you were not found in a

      pit this morning or any other morning

      beneath the shed of a troubled white man

      in your state. I am glad that we, you and I,

      only get groped on the street

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