At the Park on the Edge of the Country: Poems: The Journal Charles B. Wheeler Poetry Prize
Autor Austin Araujoen Limba Engleză Paperback – 24 feb 2025
In At the Park on the Edge of the Country, Austin Araujo maps the intricacies of memory, immigration, and belonging through the experiences of one Mexican American family—his own—in the rural American South, crystallizing memory and self-knowledge as collaborative, multivocal affairs. Human and nonhuman voices and the competing landscapes of childhood and adulthood propel these poems, offering an unyielding portrait of a family’s endless encounters with the shortcomings of citizenship. Speakers sleep like tostadas, mistake hikers crossing a small river in Arkansas for a migrant father, and hold onto silence through difficult conversations in the fields and in the city. Revelatory and striking, these poems reinvent origin myths to unmask the contradictory and expansive astonishments of Mexican American identity in the twenty-first century.
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9780814259368
ISBN-10: 0814259367
Pagini: 72
Dimensiuni: 140 x 216 x 8 mm
Greutate: 0.11 kg
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Mad Creek Books
Seria The Journal Charles B. Wheeler Poetry Prize
ISBN-10: 0814259367
Pagini: 72
Dimensiuni: 140 x 216 x 8 mm
Greutate: 0.11 kg
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Mad Creek Books
Seria The Journal Charles B. Wheeler Poetry Prize
Recenzii
“Simply cinematic—utterly memorable and moving. In these fierce and fiery poems of goldenrod and tostadas, Araujo covers satisfying and crackling ground. An imaginative debut.” —Aimee Nezhukumatathil
“The lushness of the language, the precision of the images, the humor, the deft and digressive narratives—these poems are so beautiful. But I am most moved by and keep going back to the wrenching, complicated, grown-ass poems about fathers, and about fathers and sons: by how patient Araujo is in those poems, how he lets them answer to music, and love.” —Ross Gay
“From the peripheries of oblivion, Austin Araujo coaxes honey from rock to deliver us At the Park on the Edge of the Country. . . . These poems of sensorial majesty enact the continuous process of becoming human. Their specificity, propulsive action, and deft panning from Arkansas to California and across generations remind me how miraculous the overlooked elements are of the worlds we build with our own two hands—how like reclaimed magic, inevitable and necessary.” —Paul Tran
Notă biografică
Austin Araujo is a writer from northwest Arkansas. The recipient of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University, his poems have appeared in Poetry,TriQuarterly, and Gulf Coast. At the Park on the Edge of the Country is his first book.
Extras
Another Crossing
The river sloughs off mist, elk approach
its banks for a drink. Moon perched
in the mezzanine of the night. Dogs clamor
for each other miles away. I settle
onto this stone seat trying hard to see anything
but the men stepping into the rushing water,
each holding a small bag over his head. Striding
into the silence I’ve embraced. What crossings
can be made when already in Arkansas?
One of them falls hard into the White River,
foot probably catching on some rock’s jag.
Those in front keep walking, those behind
go around his brief thrashing below the surface.
His mouth opens with ¡estoy bien!
when he rises, which disturbs the elk
who look up so that they might study him
with me, so that we all might behold the man
who is suddenly here, who, of course,
resembles my father, droplets tumbling
from his creased brow back into the current.
He blows snot from each nostril and runs
his fingers through the hair almost landing
on his shoulders as it does in my father’s first photo
ID, taken in Mexico, listing the wrong birthday,
catching him as a teen, looking like this guy
hauling his hand across the surface of the water.
He works hard to match pace, impossible, like my dad
in the White River, crossing twenty-odd years
after the fact. Who needs dreams when I’ve got eyes.
The others emerge by the shore, disappear
into the woods, refuse to wait. The elk and me,
welcome committee. A stranger climbs into the bramble
where he hollers, gaining ground on the group.
Sight and Sound
Roxie Theater, San Francisco
I am led into the dark
cinema for a restored
print of a major work
by David Lynch
he speaks to us
in a previously recorded
introduction
every now and again
I try to turn my head
an imperceptible degree
to catch you in the glow
I am taking stock
of how I feel
suspicious
but of what
there’s a woman
who makes occasional
smart comments
there’s a man
eating chocolate
and popcorn
in fistfuls
your hand opens
for potential touching
holding your
perfume in my mouth
your leather skirt
squeaks in the seat
the sun’s laboring
across the finish line
when we leave the theater
we walk toward
the bar where I’ll lose
my wallet
in the film
a man with a powdered face
says hello at a party
in one of those big LA houses
he says hello on the phone too
he likes to watch people sleep
the main character
becomes someone else
driven by formless desires
I am afraid I am
alive I am turning
twenty-six today
at an auto shop
the young man
he has become is pulled
or manipulated between
the forces of duty
the forces of desire
cars are lifted hoods
popped some force
tells him come to
the desert I am still
pulling myself
apart when you order
cocktails I am still
A Mexican American Novel
The novel includes a protagonist with a mysterious scar slashed across his scrotum as well as numerous references to tax fraud, bruised fruits, and last names. A year-in-the-life type of tale. In a pivotal September scene, he asks his father whether anything weighs more than madness. (Readers will know the man’s frown counts for an answer.) Then a flashback to when the father crushed his five-year-old son’s fingers with a rising car window. A chapter entitled “Robert Hayden Was Rarely Wrong.” The boy wanders from light source to light source: big moons, small lanterns, candles, burnt-out bulbs hanging on grocery store ceilings, and the various deep purples of a beloved’s bedroom. I’m working out how he’ll talk to lovers, but his legs will shake, bare but for goosebumps rising around his knees. In the first paragraph, the boy presses a guitar into a cloth case. By the end of the year, he’ll understand what symbolizes great human suffering and what of the ordinary self remains.
The river sloughs off mist, elk approach
its banks for a drink. Moon perched
in the mezzanine of the night. Dogs clamor
for each other miles away. I settle
onto this stone seat trying hard to see anything
but the men stepping into the rushing water,
each holding a small bag over his head. Striding
into the silence I’ve embraced. What crossings
can be made when already in Arkansas?
One of them falls hard into the White River,
foot probably catching on some rock’s jag.
Those in front keep walking, those behind
go around his brief thrashing below the surface.
His mouth opens with ¡estoy bien!
when he rises, which disturbs the elk
who look up so that they might study him
with me, so that we all might behold the man
who is suddenly here, who, of course,
resembles my father, droplets tumbling
from his creased brow back into the current.
He blows snot from each nostril and runs
his fingers through the hair almost landing
on his shoulders as it does in my father’s first photo
ID, taken in Mexico, listing the wrong birthday,
catching him as a teen, looking like this guy
hauling his hand across the surface of the water.
He works hard to match pace, impossible, like my dad
in the White River, crossing twenty-odd years
after the fact. Who needs dreams when I’ve got eyes.
The others emerge by the shore, disappear
into the woods, refuse to wait. The elk and me,
welcome committee. A stranger climbs into the bramble
where he hollers, gaining ground on the group.
Sight and Sound
Roxie Theater, San Francisco
I am led into the dark
cinema for a restored
print of a major work
by David Lynch
he speaks to us
in a previously recorded
introduction
every now and again
I try to turn my head
an imperceptible degree
to catch you in the glow
I am taking stock
of how I feel
suspicious
but of what
there’s a woman
who makes occasional
smart comments
there’s a man
eating chocolate
and popcorn
in fistfuls
your hand opens
for potential touching
holding your
perfume in my mouth
your leather skirt
squeaks in the seat
the sun’s laboring
across the finish line
when we leave the theater
we walk toward
the bar where I’ll lose
my wallet
in the film
a man with a powdered face
says hello at a party
in one of those big LA houses
he says hello on the phone too
he likes to watch people sleep
the main character
becomes someone else
driven by formless desires
I am afraid I am
alive I am turning
twenty-six today
at an auto shop
the young man
he has become is pulled
or manipulated between
the forces of duty
the forces of desire
cars are lifted hoods
popped some force
tells him come to
the desert I am still
pulling myself
apart when you order
cocktails I am still
A Mexican American Novel
The novel includes a protagonist with a mysterious scar slashed across his scrotum as well as numerous references to tax fraud, bruised fruits, and last names. A year-in-the-life type of tale. In a pivotal September scene, he asks his father whether anything weighs more than madness. (Readers will know the man’s frown counts for an answer.) Then a flashback to when the father crushed his five-year-old son’s fingers with a rising car window. A chapter entitled “Robert Hayden Was Rarely Wrong.” The boy wanders from light source to light source: big moons, small lanterns, candles, burnt-out bulbs hanging on grocery store ceilings, and the various deep purples of a beloved’s bedroom. I’m working out how he’ll talk to lovers, but his legs will shake, bare but for goosebumps rising around his knees. In the first paragraph, the boy presses a guitar into a cloth case. By the end of the year, he’ll understand what symbolizes great human suffering and what of the ordinary self remains.
Cuprins
Contents I. Another Crossing Sight and Sound A Mexican American Novel My Documentary The Tostada Translation At the Park on the Edge of the Country Within Earshot of 1991 Lost Year At Lake Temescal Aperture II. The Bull Clearing Watching Him Cross After Someone Is the Water Debut Another Look Sancho Panza Betting the House At the Park on the Edge of the White River The Father III. Gathering Jamboree, Evening, Midsummer On the Road to Irapuato Irapuato Mexican in the Meadow Early Conversation with My American Grandmother Maintenance My Condition In Body Sweet Brothers Notes Acknowledgments
Descriere
Poems that map the intricacies of memory, immigration, and belonging through the experiences of one Mexican American family in the rural American South.