The Regret Histories: Poems
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About this ebook
This powerful and provocative new installment of poetry is a recipient of the 2014 National Poetry Series Prize, as chosen by Campbell McGrath.
The National Poetry Series’s long tradition of promoting exceptional poetry from lesser-known poets delivers another outstanding collection of poetry by Joshua Poteat.
Through an investigation of the haunted spaces where history collides with the modern southern American landscape, The Regret Histories explores themes of ruin and nostalgia, our relationship to a collective past, and the extraordinary indifference of time to memory.
For thirty years, the National Poetry Series has discovered many new and emerging voices and has been instrumental in launching the careers of poets and writers such as Billy Collins, Mark Doty, Denis Johnson, Marie Howe, and Sherod Santos.
Joshua Poteat
Joshua Poteat is the author of two full-length collections, Illustrating the Machine That Makes the World, published in the VQR Poetry Series, and Ornithologies, winner of the Anhinga Prize for Poetry, as well as three chapbooks, Meditations, which received the National Chapbook Award from the Poetry Society of America, For the Animal from Diagram/New Michigan Press, and The Scenery of Farewell from Diode. He lives in Richmond, Virginia.
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The Regret Histories - Joshua Poteat
The National Poetry Series was established in 1978 to ensure the publication of five poetry books annually through five participating publishers. Publication is funded annually by the Lannan Foundation, Amazon Literary Partnership, Barnes & Noble, The Poetry Foundation, The PG Family Foundation and The Betsy Community Fund, Joan Bingham, Mariana Cook, Stephen Graham, Juliet Lea Hillman Simonds, William Kistler, Jeffrey Ravetch, Laura Baudo Sillerman, and Margaret Thornton. For a complete listing of generous contributors to The National Poetry Series, please visit www.nationalpoetryseries.org.
2014 COMPETITION WINNERS
Monograph
by Simeon Berry of Somerville, MA
Chosen by Denise Duhamel for University of Georgia Press
The Regret Histories
by Joshua Poteat of Richmond, VA
Chosen by Campbell McGrath for HarperCollins
Let’s Let That Are Not Yet : Inferno
by Ed Pavlic of Athens, GA
Chosen by John Keene for Fence Books
Double Jinx
by Nancy Reddy of Madison, WI
Chosen by Alex Lemon for Milkweed Editions
Viability
by Sarah Vap of Venice, CA
Chosen by Mary Jo Bang for Penguin Books
DEDICATION
For Jake Adam York
EPIGRAPH
I meant to write about death, only life came breaking in as usual.
— VIRGINIA WOOLF
The dead, the dead, the dead—our dead . . . all, all, all, finally dear to me.
— WALT WHITMAN
CONTENTS
Dedication
Epigraph
Tintype
ONE
Drug Department
Department of Purchase & Disease
Tintype
Lighting Department
Department of Hymnals
Tintype
Department of Telescopes
Tintype
Veterinary Department
Death of the Death of Youth
Tintype
Department of Names (Curiosities of Puritan Nomenclature)
(City, there’s a prayer for you)
Department of Acoustic Appliances
Tintype
TWO
Tintype
The Night Names Each Building
Tintype
Department of (Aerial) Photography
Tintype
THREE
For the Animal
Department of Taxidermy
FOUR
Memorial Department
Letter to Gabriel Written in the Margins of Murder Ballads
Notes
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Joshua Poteat
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
TINTYPE
Whole forests went to sea
disguised as ships.
Whole seas went to forest
disguised as time.
ONE
DRUG DEPARTMENT
I’m looking for a story that will light
my way out, a star in the sycamore’s grass,
taken from night and nothing and limbs cut
back from the wires. It is not summer,
there is no mist on the streets.
The yard, vacant with ivy and nest, wears brown,
and the streetlights. The sycamore is the loudest tree,
its bark lifting the hard wind like the saint
who prayed to the east and failed, parchment
spread on the monastery roof. Help me
spelled out in supplicant ink, roaring through
clots of frost. Look at us, late winter, pulling dead
branches from the fence at night to avoid the neighbors,
poison pushed under the shed for the rats.
Let’s surrender all illusions of spirit, because it deceives us.
The spirit is not air, even in its highest