
Little What
Little What by Jeff Oaks. Includes shipping and handling in the USA
$15.00
Praise for Little What
The poems in ‘Little What’ map a sustained devotion to small details that, under the poet’s attentive scrutiny, blossom repeatedly into surprise and wonder. Jeff Oaks understands the longing and distance that persist even in close physicality, and the mystery that can arise from the familiar. Take, for example, the poem “Sunflower”: the transfer from it to us is gorgeous yet careful, as in full of care. I’ve waited so long for this book to arrive in the world. Savor it. —Ron Mohring, author of Survivable World
Salt, parsnips, violets, bees with their dance-map of the city—common everyday objects fill these marvelous poems that build themselves like row houses, row houses of wonder with their “little song of nails.” And too there is a formal searching—from sapphics to sonnets—always rigorous in its investigation and always leading us to insight. Here, we find manifestos to queerness as well as a necessary revising of masculinity and the male body—re-telling the personal and cultural stories of brothers, sons, and fathers while asking, trenchantly and with Rilke-like imploring, that we “begin again.” —Brandon Som, author of Babel’s Moon and The Tribute Horse
Sample Poems from Little What by Jeff Oaks
Sunflower
We don’t have a good name for what
weakens the shell, cracks it open, makes us
step out into the light. First bees with
their powdered legs then small sparrows who
rain down seed-slivers over the sidewalk.
Why stand out here staring at the great flower
grown in a pot I nearly threw away? It
has a kind of stature for all its luck I
might say I lack. Although I am here
watching small birds remove each seed
with the cunning of jewelers. With all
the courage to continue. Without a name
for any of the things they don’t have.
Little Night Song
Sometimes I wake up thinking it’s
someone trying the lock on the front door
in the middle of the night but
it’s only the dog muttering something, rattling
his jaws at the end of the bed. Sometimes I
think it’s rain but it’s only the black dog
I rescued to keep me from thinking
certain kinds of thoughts. Often
I have to listen a long time until
I make out what it is that’s there
in the room with me, a hot
fear that rises up immediately
and out of an old reason I still call
my father. Because he set my nerves
so early on to terror, to hide.
But listen, honestly, he’s dead now,
and I’m old enough to take him on,
so how long can I continue to name
everything after him, call him the cause
of everything gone bad? Every day
the news brings stories of abuse
that make my childhood seem lucky.
And if I have this dog who occasionally
sounds like creaky stairs,
a jiggled knob, a kind of rain hitting
the window like small gravel, it is only
a memory of threat. If I were so concerned
that my father’s here, I could
just walk downstairs to find him
smoking and drinking his coffee black,
sit down at the table in that darkness
and relax. He liked the quiet;
he drank it in. Maybe it’s who else
might be at my table now that worries me.