Mars Poetica

Contents " Mars Poetica " " The Kind of Rain 8 This Lightness Plaza de Toros Viral Movement Lifeboat This Train The Next New Thing 15 Rosemary¿s Babies 16 Angels My Idea What I Might Have Done 19 II How Silent the Trees 21 Hurricane Pity Quake Pulse Drummer Sort it Out Mixup at the Speakeasy 28 Her Measured Fall 29 Gravity Counting The Loneliest Road in America 32 III Collected Works 34 Needles and Haste 35 Vectors Gunfire Intense Death of the Cool 39 Tread Lightly Harvest Moon Trapped in a Decade Long Gone 42 She Erased His Mouth 43 Alaska Pirated Debris IV Abstraction Drinking the Stars 49 Menu Parade Three Loves Flow Belief The Watcher Documents Film Starboard The Road Ends Here 59 Acknowledgments 60 Thank You About the Author 62

Wyn Cooper has published four previous books of poetry, most recently Chaos is the New Calm (BOA Editions, 2010). His poems, stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, AGNI, The Southern Review, Five Points, Slate, and more than 100 other magazines. His poems are included in 25 anthologies of contemporary poetry, including Poetry: An Introduction, The Mercury Reader, Outsiders, and Ecstatic Occasions, Expedient Forms. In 1993, ¿Fun,¿ a poem from his first book, was turned into Sheryl Crow¿s Grammy-winning song ¿All I Wanna Do.¿ He has also cowritten songs with David Broza, David Baerwald, Jody Redhage, and Bill Bottrell. In 2003, Gaff Music released Forty Words for Fear, a CD of songs based on poems and lyrics by Cooper, set to music and sung by the novelist Madison Smartt Bell. Their second CD, Postcards Out of the Blue, based in part on Cooper¿s postcard poems, was released in 2008. Their songs have been featured on six television shows. Cooper has taught at the University of Utah, Bennington College, Marlboro College, and at The Frost Place. He has given readings across the country, as well as in Europe. He is a former editor of Quarterly West, and the recipient of a fellowship from the Ucross Foundation. For two years he worked at the Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute, a think tank run by the Poetry Foundation, and now serves on the Writers Advisory Board of the Nantucket Book Festival. He lives in Boston and works as a freelance editor. www.wyncooper.com