Table of Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS

From Again the Gemini are in the Orchard
Twenty-three 9
She and I 10
A Postscript 23
Weird Beach 24
The Other 25
Parting 26
The Main Attraction 27
Ceci n’est pas un morçeau de fromage 28
Death 29

From Dying for Beauty
I Died for Beauty 31
from The Earth as Desdemona 32
Ne Me Quitte Pas 40
from Sor Juana’s Last Dream 41

From Poems for Infidels
Tango of Fear 43
Tiger-Kitten 44
Dance of Re-memberment 45
Elegy from a Nightingale’s Point of View 46
Poem 50
The Story of O as Told by E 51
Cirque du Liz and Dick 52
An Ornate Encounter 54


From Blue Shadow Behind Everything Dazzling
A Portal on the Forehead 56
Go On, Sure, Why Not? 57
Domestic Animals 59
Someone Greeting you from Afar 60
When This Warm Scribe My Hand 61
What Is So Amazing 62

From So Quick Bright Things
Jade Night 65
Effusion 1 66
Couple with their Heads Full of Clouds 67
What Scrapes the Clouds: A Digression, or
Christopher Marlowe is Dead 68
Tortured Little Sensitivities 69
Afternoon of a Faun 70
Sphinx-like 71
Effusion 5 72

From Imperfect Pastorals
Clearer than amber gliding over stones 74
The light and shade upon the globe 75
For not in vain we name the constellations 76
So much effect has habit on the young 77
What delays the long nights 78
Dry cracking sounds are heard 79
Wild beasts and fish, cattle and colored birds 81
Alone, rather because not otherwise 82
The heron leaves her haunts in the marsh 83
And in green meadows raise a marble temple 84
Light chaff and falling leaves or a pair of feathers 85
Drawn by a team of three-legged fish-tailed horses 86
Days such as these shone out and went their way 88
Let not the spangled lizard’s scaly back 90
in these latitudes/of indeterminate/waves 91
Wild olive, bitter-leaved, alone survive 92
Let thought become your beautiful lover 93
What need to tell of autumn’s storms and stars 94
The bank all green with celery, the cucumber snaking 95
The trees that lift themselves spontaneously 96

New Poems
Poetry 98
Let’s Not Fetishize the Negativity 99
The Only Thing We Have to Lose is Loss Itself 100
Brushing Against the There 101
Photograph 103
The Petty Infinite 104
Eternity in the Santa Monica Mountains 105
House with Two Wounds 106
Conspiratorial We 107
A Mountain of Gin 108
Aging 109
The Avocado Tree’s Rebirth 110
Jasmine 111
Historians of the Defeat 112
Tony 113
How It’s Done 114
Keep Me Violent, She Says 115
The Poem Rings Twice 116
Perilous Observations 117
Driven into Nowhere by this Poem 118
The Non-Self 119
The Necklace 120

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About the Author

Gail Wronsky is the author, coauthor, or translator of twelve books of poetry and prose, including the poetry collections Imperfect Pastorals; Poems for Infidels; and Dying for Beauty. She has an MFA from the University of Virginia and a PhD from the University of Utah, and teaches at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.

Reviews

“Gail Wronsky is an astonishing poet whose work I’ve turned to for more than twenty-five years to find the most deeply compassionate, artistically complex and intellectually astute poetry being written in this country. She is a literary revisionist of the most exquisite order, reconstructing the poetic canon, challenging the historical conventions of poetry and striking urgent, lyric chords of female empowerment. A breathtaking stylist—at times philosophical and meditative, at times powerfully gestural and painterly—Gail Wronsky is a poet of lasting beauty and relentless invention. With this book she takes her rightful place among the most celebrated of American poets.” —David St. John

“A master of the lyric, a visionary never far from the complicated, wondrous relations between world and imagination, body and mind, Gail Wronsky is one of our most indispensable poets. Her Under the Capsized Boat We Fly: New and Selected Poems brings together a body of work that is at once fierce, sensual and startling: “I lie like a sunbeam/amazed/at the edge of the page.” The scale, the point of view Wronsky inhabits––part oracle, part brilliant best friend––is unlike any poetry I know. Anarchy, domesticity, death, love, and the delicate, almost unnoticed invisibilities of the quotidian reign, never far from revolution. An epigrammatic wisdom arrives by often standing on its head: an uncanny truth that is so second-guessed and interrogated one can’t help but trust in Muriel Ruykeyser’s prediction: “If a woman said the truth about her life, the world would split open.” At last, as Etta James would sing it. As spiky and uncompromising as the work of Leonara Carrington, these poems carry a rare, mystical alchemy. And as Wronsky writes, “I am the woman filming it.”” —Gillian Conoley