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Milkweed Smithereens gathers lively, wickedly smart, intimate, and indelible Bernadette Mayer poems: the volume ranges from brand-new nature poems, pastiches, sequences, epigrams, and excerpts from her Covid Diary and Second World of Nature to early poems and sonnets found in the attic or rooted out in the UC San Diego archive. The world of nature and the pandemic loom large, as in her “The Lobelias of Fear”:…but how will we, still alive, socializein the winter? wrapped in bear skinswe’ll sit around pot-bellied stoves eatingthe lobelias of fear left over from desperation,last summer’s woodland sunflowers and bee balm remind us of blackcherries eaten in a hurrywhile the yard grows in the moonlightshrinking like a salary …
Milkweed Smithereens gathers lively, wickedly smart, intimate, and indelible Bernadette Mayer poems: the volume ranges from brand-new nature poems, pastiches, sequences, epigrams, and excerpts from her Covid Diary and Second World of Nature to early poems and sonnets found in the attic or rooted out in the UC San Diego archive. The world of nature and the pandemic loom large, as in her “The Lobelias of Fear”:…but how will we, still alive, socializein the winter? wrapped in bear skinswe’ll sit around pot-bellied stoves eatingthe lobelias of fear left over from desperation,last summer’s woodland sunflowers and bee balm remind us of blackcherries eaten in a hurrywhile the yard grows in the moonlightshrinking like a salary …