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    Dresses from the Old Country
    Dresses from the Old Country
    Dresses from the Old Country
    Ebook114 pages42 minutes

    Dresses from the Old Country

    By Laura Read

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    About this ebook

    In Laura Read’s second poetry collection, the former poet laureate of Spokane, WA, weaves past and present together to create a portrait of a life in progress. As the speaker looks back on her life, she exists simultaneously as all the selves she has ever been: a lost child, a lonely adolescent, a teacher, a daughter, a friend, a wife, a mother—a woman continually shaped and reshaped by memory and experience. Deeply rooted in a particular time and place, Read’s poems strip away the illusion of the passage of time as they reveal how we are all wearing “dresses from the old country.”
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBOA Editions Ltd.
    Release dateOct 9, 2018
    ISBN9781942683674
    Dresses from the Old Country
    Author

    Laura Read

    Laura Read was born in New York City and has lived most of her life in Spokane, WA. She is the author of Dresses from the Old Country (BOA Editions, 2018), Instructions for My Mother’s Funeral (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012, winner of the AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry), and the chapbook The Chewbacca on Hollywood Boulevard Reminds Me of You (winner of the Floating Bridge Press Chapbook Award, 2011). A recipient of a Washington State Artists Trust Grant, a Florida Review Prize for Poetry, and the Crab Creek Review Prize for Poetry, Laura presents regularly at literary festivals and conferences throughout the Northwest, including GetLit!, Write on the Sound, Litfuse, and the Port Townsend Writers Conference. Laura served as Spokane’s Poet Laureate from 2015 to 2017, and she currently teaches at Spokane Falls Community College.

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      Book preview

      Dresses from the Old Country - Laura Read

      [image: cover]

      Copyright © 2018 by Laura Read

      All rights reserved

      Manufactured in the United States of America

      First Edition

      18  19  20  21  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

      For information about permission to reuse any material from this book, please contact The Permissions Company at www.permissionscompany.com or e-mail permdude@gmail.com.

      Publications by BOA Editions, Ltd.—a not-for-profit corporation under section 501 (c) (3) of the United States Internal Revenue Code—are made possible with funds from a variety of sources, including public funds from the Literature Program of the National Endowment for the Arts; the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency; and the County of Monroe, NY. Private funding sources include the Lannan Foundation; the Max and Marian Farash Charitable Foundation; the Mary S. Mulligan Charitable Trust; the Rochester Area Community Foundation; the Ames-Amzalak Memorial Trust in memory of Henry Ames, Semon Amzalak, and Dan Amzalak; and contributions from many individuals nationwide. See Colophon on page 96 for special individual acknowledgments.

      Cover Design: Sandy Knight

      Cover Art: Belinda Bryce

      Interior Design and Composition: Richard Foerster

      Manufacturing: McNaughton & Gunn

      BOA Logo: Mirko

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Names: Read, Laura, author.

      Title: Dresses from the old country : poems / by Laura Read.

      Description: First edition. | Rochester, NY : BOA Editions, Ltd., [2018] | Series: American poets continuum series ; no. 168

      Identifiers: LCCN 2018015160 (print) | LCCN 2018018260 (ebook) | ISBN 9781942683674 (ebook) | ISBN 9781942683667 (pbk. : alk. paper)

      Classification: LCC PS3618.E224 (ebook) | LCC PS3618.E224 A6 2018 (print) | DDC 811/.6—dc23

      LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018015160

      BOA Editions, Ltd.

      250 North Goodman Street, Suite 306

      Rochester, NY 14607

      www.boaeditions.org

      A. Poulin, Jr., Founder (1938–1996)

      CONTENTS

      Title Page

      Copyright

      Dedication

      In Praise of Shadows

      I

      Vaccination

      Here Is a Map

      The Sunshine Family

      Adrian!

      Flashdance

      Bali Ha’i

      Renaissance Body

      Ghost Clothes

      Alaska

      That Last Time

      Introduction to Poetry

      Thinking of You

      Gloves

      Ferguson’s

      When You Have Lived a Long Time in One Place

      Metaline Falls

      Colonel George Wright Shot 800 Horses Here

      St. Aloysius Gonzaga, Pray for Us

      Faulkner’s Emily

      Gemini

      Bureau

      II

      When I Think About What I Know About My Heart

      You Are on the Green Level

      What the Body Does

      People Don’t Die of It Anymore

      Pentecost

      Accelerated Learning

      Brown in the Brown Branches

      Douchebag

      Briar Rose

      July

      State Line

      Wicked

      Invagination

      Beth and Her Piano

      Last Night Ferguson’s Caught Fire

      Cathedral

      Apollo 9

      Spring and Fall

      Mary’s Waking Dream

      The Big Chill

      100-Year-Old Box of Negatives Discovered by Conservators in Antarctica

      Ruins

      Acknowledgments

      About the Author

      Colophon

      for Brad, Ben, and Matthew

      There was a choice of pie for dessert, and one was blueberry and one was apple, and the waitresses were the same country girls, there having been no passage of time, only the illusion of it as in a dropped curtain—the waitresses were still fifteen; their hair had been washed, that was the only difference—they had been to the movies and seen the pretty girls with the clean hair.

      —from Once More to the Lake by E. B. White

      IN PRAISE OF SHADOWS

      Junichirō Tanizaki says the Japanese

      love shadows, their lights low

      when they eat, their silverware tarnished.

      Tanizaki asks, Why so much shine?

      He wants to raise the lacquered bowl

      to his lips and stare into its darkness,

      a lake you can slip inside,

      your body glowing like the moon

      casting its own shadow on the surface,

      larger, smudged, a moon

      that’s been crying, its face puffy and soft.

      What kind of child names her yellow dog

      Shadow? How did I know she would become

      the shape of our grief, following

      my mother’s body when she went down

      to do laundry, the sheets always needing

      to be changed, at the end several times a day?

      Last night I dreamed of a canvas

      with something painted in each corner,

      a girl, a boy, a window, water.

      I could only see one piece of the painting

      at a time, I was sick and

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