A Walk with Frank O'Hara

Poems

by Susan Aizenberg

Mary Burritt Christiansen Poetry Series

Published by: University of New Mexico Press

152 Pages, 6.00 x 9.00 in

Paperback
9780826366665 | August 2024

$18.95

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EPUB
9780826366672 | August 2024

$9.99

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Description
Contributors
Acclaim
Table Of Contents

Susan Aizenberg uses a range of techniques in her newest collection of poetry to explore contemporary daily life in a difficult world. She critiques gender, grief, culture, and the myriad experiences that define us. But even when grappling with old wounds, a strain of romance runs throughout the book, reminding readers that it’s between the love and the grief that we’ll find the moments worth being shared and savored.

Susan Aizenberg is the author of the poetry collections Quiet City and Muse and the coeditor of The Extraordinary Tide: New Poetry by American Women.

“Susan Aizenberg is a poet with a wonderfully distinct voice—the poems in A Walk With Frank O’Hara have that difficult-to-achieve illusion of effortlessness I deeply admire, with no fussiness or straining for effect, but rather a clean elegance that allows Aizenberg’s natural lyricism to shine. Aizenberg is one of the most accomplished poets writing in America today.”—Erin Belieu, author of Come-Hither Honeycomb: Poems

“These beautifully detailed yet restrained poems smolder with the force of resistance—against ‘good-girl rules,’ against the indignities of death, against what the news brings us every day. Aizenberg’s is a sensibility grown brave, empathic, and supple, flinching from nothing, and able to hold but not surrender to the pain of not flinching.”—Leslie Ullman, author of Unruly Tree: Poems

“Susan Aizenberg embraces influences—including Denise Levertov, Stephen Dunn, and Louis Simpson—to create exquisite narratives about human freedom. . . . Her poems shimmer with clarity. Her meditations marvel.”—Denise Duhamel, author of Second Story

I
A Walk with Frank O’Hara
Hunger
Sympathetic Magic
Song
The Beautiful American Word Baby
There but for Fortune
Eleanor Remembers Her Soldier
Eleanor Can’t Sleep
La Liseuse
In My Other Life My Mother Fails
Michael Corleone Prepares for Bed
Western
Tea Boys
Jane County Corrections
Errata

II
Charm against Recollection
The Worn-Out Dancing Shoes
This Morning My Friend Writes
Poem Beginning with a Line from Louis Simpson
Childhood
Dish Pigs
only here. only now.
Ode
At the Chicago Art Institute
From Her Chair in a Hoop of Pale-Yellow Lamplight
Shameeka
Three Rispetti
Poem Beginning with a Line from Adelia Prado
First Light
People Knew How to Dress in the Forties

III
Monday
For Ruth Ellis, Last Woman Hanged in England
Not One Woman I Know Hasn’t These Stories
On Reading That, According to the Jewish Calendar, Days Begin with Night
Now That You’re Nowhere
Blackhawk Park
Postcard from New Hampshire
Autobiographobia
On Your Wedding Day You Must Fast and Weep: A Found Poem
Lines Written during a Pandemic
Forced March
After Reading the News this Morning, I Turn to the Curses of My Ancestors: A Found Poem
Dream Poem Beginning with Three Lines from Stephen Dunn
This Side
On Prospect

Acknowledgments
Notes