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    Marvelous Things Overheard: Poems
    Marvelous Things Overheard: Poems
    Marvelous Things Overheard: Poems
    Ebook88 pages57 minutes

    Marvelous Things Overheard: Poems

    By Ange Mlinko

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    About this ebook

    A vibrant and eclectic collection from a stunningly mature young poet

    "The world—the time has come to say it, though the news will not be welcome to everyone—has no intention of abandoning enchantment altogether." Roberto Calasso's words in Literature and the Gods remind us that, in an age of reason, of mechanization, of alienation, of rote drudgery, we still seek out the transcendent, the marvelous. Ange Mlinko's luminous fourth collection is both a journey toward and the space of that very enchantment.
    Marvelous Things Overheard takes its title from a collection of ancient rumors about the lands of the Mediterranean. Mlinko, who lived at the American University of Beirut and traveled to Greece and Cyprus, has penned poems that seesaw between the life lived in those ancient and strife-torn places, and the life imagined through its literature: from The Greek Anthology to the Mu'allaqat. Throughout, Mlinko grapples with the passage of time on two levels: her own aging (alongside the growing up of her children) and the incontrovertible evidence of millennia of human habitation.
    This is an assured and revealing collection, one that readers will want to seek refuge in again and again.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateJul 22, 2014
    ISBN9781466876330
    Marvelous Things Overheard: Poems
    Author

    Ange Mlinko

    Ange Mlinko is the author of several books of poetry, including Distant Mandate and Marvelous Things Overheard. She has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Randall Jarrell Award for Criticism, and served as Poetry Editor for The Nation. Her essays and reviews have been published in The Nation, The London Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, Poetry, and Parnassus. Educated at St. John’s College and Brown University, she has lived abroad in Morocco and Lebanon, and is currently Professor of English at the University of Florida. She lives in Gainesville.

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      Book preview

      Marvelous Things Overheard - Ange Mlinko

      I

      THE GRIND

      Three ciabbatini for breakfast

      where demand for persnickety bread

      is small, hence its expense, hence my steadfast

      recalculation of my overhead,

      which soars, and as you might expect

      the ciabbatini stand in for my fantasy

      of myself in a sea-limned prospect,

      on a terrace, with a lemon tree …

      Not: Assessed a fee for rent sent a day late.

      Not: Fines accrued for a lost library book.

      Better never lose track of the date.

      Oversleep, and you’re on the hook.

      It’s the margin for error: shrinking.

      It’s life ground down to recurrence.

      It’s fewer books read for the thinking

      the hospital didn’t rebill the insurance;

      the school misplaced the kids’ paperwork.

      Here’s our sweet pup, a rescue

      which we nonetheless paid for, and look:

      he gets more grooming than I do.

      When I turn my hand mill, I think of the dowager

      who ground gems on ham for her guests;

      the queen who ground out two cups of flour

      on the pregnant abdomen of her husband’s mistress;

      I think of a great rock-eating bird

      grinding out a sandy beach,

      the foam said to be particulate matter

      of minute crustaceans, each

      brilliantly spooning up Aphrodite

      to Greek porticoes, and our potatoes,

      and plain living which might be

      shaken by infinitesimal tattoos.

      WORDS ARE THE REVERSE OF PAIN

      Had something gone wrong then I wouldn’t be here

      to tell you this: In November 1944 a baby boy was born

      in Germany—in a cave, they kept saying,

      she gave birth in a cave.

      The villages between Minsk and

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