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    Storm Toward Morning
    Storm Toward Morning
    Storm Toward Morning
    Ebook82 pages44 minutes

    Storm Toward Morning

    By Malachi Black

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    About this ebook

    "To be both visionary and accurate, true to physics and metaphysics at the same time, is rare and puts the poet in some rarefied company. Black, like a few other younger poets, is willing to include all the traditional effects of the lyric poem in his work, but he has set them going in new and lively ways, with the confidence of virtuosity and a belief in the ancient pleasures of pattern and repetition."—Mark Jarman, American Poet

    Lush and daring, Malachi Black's poems in Storm Toward Morning press all points along the spectrum of human positions, from sickness, isolation, and insomniac disarray to serenity, wonder, and spiritual yearning. Pulsing at the intersections of "eye and I," body and mind, physical and metaphysical, Black brings distinctive voice, vision, and music to matters of universal mortal concern.

    Query on Typography

    What is the light
    inside the opening
    of every letter: white
    behind the angles
    is a language bright
    because a curvature
    of space inside
    a line is visible
    is script a sign
    of what it does
    or does not occupy
    scripture the covenant
    of eye and I
    with word or what
    the word defines
    which is source
    and which is shrine
    the light of body
    or the light behind?

    Malachi Black holds a BA in literature from New York University and an MFA in creative writing from the University of Texas at Austin’s Michener Center for Writers. His poems have appeared in AGNI, Boston Review, Ploughshares, and Poetry. He currently teaches at the University of San Diego and lives in California.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCopper Canyon Press
    Release dateMar 21, 2016
    ISBN9781619321281
    Storm Toward Morning

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    • 5/5
      Echoes of Rilke and Eliot resound in this well crafted debut collection. There is a deal of great sound here, and successful, mind blowing rhyme. I am not very keen on rhyme in free verse, but Malachi Black knows what he's doing. Some frank but lyrical meditations on mortality, death, and God in the vein of the aforementioned. This is the best individual collection of poems I have read in years and I can't wait for his next book.

    Book preview

    Storm Toward Morning - Malachi Black

    I

    Under an Eclipsing Moon

    I am the black strokes on the baby grand

    piano in whose hands I am tonight

    beside the hospital, a yellow gram

    of Valium with me in the bright

    side of this house behind a darkened high

    school baseball diamond. Here it’s too dim,

    too overcast to know what sort of slim

    lip the moon has grooved into the sky.

    So what can I, whose veins are purpled through

    with bits of broken glass and vodka,

    whose heart claps like a shoe, what can I do

    but play a drunken, pill-induced sonata,

    watch it backflip and rebound, caterwauling

    in a somersault of sound around the room?

    Traveling by Train

    And faster past another frozen river,

    the brambles, shrubs, and underbrush of dead

    woods and the garbage that was left behind

    by runaways and skunks: the plastic bags

    and twine, shoes beside forgotten brands

    of beer whose cans, so battered by the weather,

    have all but disappeared—like the whiteness

    of a smoke after it’s cleared. And you’ve been on

    this train too long to know the time: you’re lost

    between the meter and the desperate rhyme

    of clacking tracks. Home is nothing here.

    You’re gone and in the going; can’t come back.

    Insomnia & So On

    Fat bed, lick the black cat in my mouth

    each morning. Unfasten all the bones

    that make a head, and let me rest: unknown

    among the oboe-throated geese gone south

    to drop their down and sleep beside the out-

    bound tides. Now there’s no nighttime I can own

    that isn’t anxious as a phone

    about to ring. Give me some doubt

    on loan; give me a way to get away

    from what I know. I pace until the sun

    is in my window. I lie down. I’m a

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