Another City: Poems

By: David Keplinger

Sign Up Now! Already a Member? Log In
You must be logged into Bookshare to access this title. Learn about membership options, or view our freely available titles.

Synopsis: WINNER OF THE UNT RILKE PRIZEHow does it feel to experience another city? To stand beneath tall buildings, among the countless faces of a crowd? To attempt to be heard above the din?The poems of Another City travel inward and outward at once: into moments of self-reproach and grace, and to those of disassociation and belonging. From experiences defined by an urban landscape—a thwarted customer at the door of a shuttered bookstore in Crete, a chance encounter with a might-have-been lover in Copenhagen—to the streets themselves, where &“an alley was a comma in the agony&’s grammar,&” in David Keplinger&’s hands startling images collide and mingle like bodies on a busy thoroughfare.Yet Another City deftly spans not only the physical space of global cities, but more intangible and intimate distances: between birth and death, father and son, past and present, metaphor and reality. In these poems, our entry into the world is when &“the wound, called loneliness, / opens,&” and our voyage out of it is through a foreign but not entirely unfamiliar constellations of cities: Cherbourg, Manila, Port-au-Prince.This is a rich portrait of the seemingly incommunicable expanses between people, places, and ideas—and the ability of a poem to transcend the void.