Exit Civilian: Poems (The National Poetry Series) - Softcover

Idra Novey (author)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 082034348X ISBN 13: 9780820343488

Publisher: University of Georgia Press, 2012

Synopsis

In her second collection, Idra Novey steps in and out of jails, courthouses, and caves to explore what confinement means in the twenty-first century. From the beeping doors of a prison in New York to cellos playing in a former jail in Chile, she looks at prisons that have opened, closed, and transformed to examine how the stigma of incarceration has altered American families, including her own. Novey writes of the expanding prison complex that was once a field and imagines what’s next for the civilians who enter and exit it each day.

On Bafflement

We drew a prison in the sand and it wouldn’t go away.

Not even beneath the foam of the biggest waves.

The torn leg of a starfish clung to the door.

A piece of seaweed clung to the bars over the windows.

The tide came in higher and we thought, So much for the prison.

Somebody asked why did we draw that thing,

And were we growing old watching it this way.

We felt compelled to make love in the sand a few feet off.

Then we drew another one, just to see if we’d make love again.

About this title

About the Author

IDRA NOVEY is the author of the novel Ways to Disappear. Her fiction and poetry have been translated into ten languages, and she has written for the New York Times the Los Angeles Times, NPR’s All Things Considered, New York Magazine, and the Paris Review. She is the recipient of awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Poets & Writers Magazine, the PEN Translation Fund, and the Poetry Foundation. She has taught at Princeton University, Columbia, NYU, Fordham, the Catholic University of Chile, and in the Bard Prison Initiative.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Publication date: 2012
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 082034348X
• ISBN 13: 9780820343488
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 88