Nightingalelessness (Paperback)

Through branching clauses of off-kilter syntax, Graham Foust makes poetry in Nightingalelessness from the common stuff of conversations, including the ones bouncing around in our heads. "If you think you've seen it all you've seen one thing." By observation and direct address, these poems surge forward as a way to retreat and reflect. They concern what Keats calls "the weariness, the fever, and the fret" of adulthood, the weight of time, when the music has stopped. Yet in the syncopation of action against uncertainty, thought against belief, Foust uncovers a wobbly new music.
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/>Sample Poem:
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/>I heard someone who'd once hurt me
/>had slipped, had fallen on the stairs
/>down to Bergen Street station
/>and broken terribly some vertebrae,
/>and in my gasping at this fact, my breath
/>came back, for just an instant, as happiness,
/>and then I wanted to die from shame, a shame
/>it seemed could really only be achieved
/>by way of the end of some world.