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    Streets in Their Own Ink: Poems
    Streets in Their Own Ink: Poems
    Streets in Their Own Ink: Poems
    Ebook82 pages38 minutes

    Streets in Their Own Ink: Poems

    By Stuart Dybek

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    About this ebook

    In a city like that one might sail
    through life led by a runaway hat.
    The young scattered in whatever directions
    their wild hair pointed and, gusting
    into one another, they fell in love.
    --from "Windy City"

    In his second book of poems, Stuart Dybek finds extraordinary vitality in the same vibrant imagery that animates his celebrated works of fiction. A brilliant and deft enactment of place, these poems map the internal geographies of characters who inhabit severe and often savage city streets, finding there a tension that transfigures past and present, memory and fantasy, sin and sanctity, nostalgia and the need to forget. Full of music and ecstasy, the poems of Streets in Their Own Ink consecrate a shadowed, alternate city of dreams and retrospection that parallels a modern city of hard realities. Throughout, one finds poetry enlivened by Dybek's signature talent for translating "extreme and fantastic events into a fabulous dailiness, as though the extraordinary were everywhere around us if only someone would tell us where to look" (Geoffrey Wolff).

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateMay 20, 2014
    ISBN9781466871724
    Streets in Their Own Ink: Poems
    Author

    Stuart Dybek

    Stuart Dybek is the author of five books of fiction--Ecstatic Cahoots, Paper Lantern, I Sailed with Magellan, The Coast of Chicago, and Childhood and Other Neighborhoods--as well as two collections of poetry, Brass Knuckles and Streets in Their Own Ink. Dybek is the recipient of many prizes and awards, including the PEN/Malamud Award, an Arts and Letters Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Whiting Writers' Award, four O. Henry Awards, a MacArthur Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is distinguished writer-in-residence at Northwestern University.

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      Book preview

      Streets in Their Own Ink - Stuart Dybek

      I

      Windy City

      The garments worn in flying dreams

      were fashioned there—

      overcoats that swooped like kites,

      scarves streaming like vapor trails,

      gowns ballooning into spinnakers.

      In a city like that one might sail

      through life led by a runaway hat.

      The young scattered in whatever directions

      their wild hair pointed, and gusting

      into one another, fell in love.

      At night, wind rippled saxophones

      that hung like windchimes in pawnshop

      windows, hooting through each horn

      so that the streets seemed haunted

      not by nighthawks, but by doves.

      Pinwheels whirred from steeples

      in place of crosses. At the pinnacles

      of public buildings, snagged underclothes—

      the only flag—flapped majestically.

      And when it came time to disappear

      one simply chose a thoroughfare

      devoid of memories, raised a collar,

      and turned his back on the wind.

      I closed my eyes and

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