American ghost roses : poems / by Kevin Stein.

Includes bibliographies and index.

Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Table of Contents -- One -- Wishful Rhetoric -- Two -- To the Reader Awakened by a Noisy Furnace -- An American Tale of Sex and Death -- Reintroductions -- Adolescent Hemlock -- In the House of Being -- The Cost -- Revelation in Pinks and Red -- Superstitious Manna -- Kandinsky's Concerning the Spiritual in Art -- Windfall -- Upon Witnessing My Mother Impossibly Blossom above My Father's Deathbed -- Three -- Love Poem with Knife and Last Cut Zinnia -- Sappho's Fragment 63

Instructor's Comments on the Poem Eden Sleeping, Circa 1975How He Answered the Glossy Magazine's Mate-Poaching Survey -- Upon Blowing Our Chance to Meet the Poet Laureate, Who's Probably a Nice Guy -- Etiquette and Epiphany in the Post-Workshop Men's Room -- The Other One -- To Bob Marley's Toe -- Ghosts -- To Bananas -- Reliquary -- Four -- Thinking of Kandinsky while Shaving My Father -- Theory and Practice -- Valentine's Day Boxing at the Madison County Jail -- Found in a Shoe Box Labeled Keep -- In the Nuclear Age

Upon Freeing the Ruby-Throated Hummingbird Beak-Stuck in a Screen DoorTo Wheelbarrows -- While Writing This Poem, My Horse Jumped the Pasture Fence -- These Gifts -- Won't You Stand Next to My Fire -- Tract

In his first book as the poet laureate of Illinois, Kevin Stein shoulders an array of poetic forms, blending pathos, humor, and social commentary. These poems--ranging from meditative narratives to improvisational lyrics--explore art's capacity to embody as well as express contemporary culture. Stein embraces subjects as various as his father's death, magazine sex surveys, Kandinsky's theory of art, the dangling modifier, Jimi Hendrix's flaming guitar, racial bigotry, and a teacher's comments on a botched poem. Presiding over this miscellany are ghosts of a peculiarly American garden of dreamers and beloved misfits, those redeemed and those left fingering the locked gate._x000B__x000B__x000B__x000B__x000B__x000B__x000B__x000B_

COPYRIGHT NOT covered - Click this link to request copyright permission:

https://lib.ciu.edu/copyright-request-form