The Complete Stories - Softcover

Warren, Noah

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1556596162 ISBN 13: 9781556596162

Publisher: Copper Canyon Press, 2021

Synopsis

The Complete Stories announces its desire and its lie in the title; this is a book of shatter and loss. In his second collection, Noah Warren―previously selected by Carl Phillips for the Yale Series of Younger Poets―unravels histories both personal and public, picking apart their ugliness, beauty, and irreducible singularity. Clothed in broken forms, these poems of grieving and tentative joy ask finally how we can go forward with our own mottled pasts, into the futures we can’t predict but for which we must bear responsibility.

About this title

About the Author

Noah Warren was born in Canada and is the author of The Destroyer in the Glass (2016), chosen by Carl Phillips for the Yale Series of Younger Poets. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow, he is pursuing a PhD in English at UC Berkeley. He lives in Oakland. His poems appear in The Paris Review, Poetry, ZYZZYVA, PEN America, New England Review, Narrative, The Southern Review, AGNI, Poets.org, The Sewanee Review, and elsewhere.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Novel

A feeling became dear

year buried in year
fox stashed in my cloak.

I named it paragraph.
A feeling became dear

melody, brother,
mind.
The dog simpers

in his kennel,
poor idea.

This to keep you safe.
We loved each other

in a cabin on the lake.
You clawed my thigh,

bit at my nipple.
I named you paragraph.

I surrounded you with a life,
I named you paragraph.

I see these eerie muslin flounces
when I close my eyes.

Whole dresses folding
down into a cubic inch.


Novel

Who lies by the lake and hears high cloud ripping

Who undertakes another great project in the fall

Who changes partners

Who has eaten, all told, so much food

Who has been penetrated

Who has been not penetrated

Who travels to a student’s funeral knowing no one
and, because of a flight delay, arrives too late

Who has no thoughts whatsoever over a cortado

Who eats a bag of grapes a day

Who swallows grapes without ever chewing
then shits them out, like little eggs, crumpled but whole

Who works two good jobs

Who always knows which drug, just how much, and from whom

Who finds a sense of purpose at home

Who rests like a dough

Who senses an eerie kindness glowing in the soft spring loam
walking in the dripping woods for the first time in a while
and understands, after an hour, how the dead do it

Who traces the rim, calm

Who decays out of kindness


Novel

Tom was everybody’s ex. “He’s an almost,” everyone said, of William.
At midnight awkwardness passed from Ioanna to Leigh like a trophy.
Happy Hour morphed into Thrust and Parry Hour, Daniel versus Team Sloane.
Separately, fiercely, Eva and Min would bring up the day they hung out like friends.
A theory grew about love as a lobster, claws meat and shell. I blamed Liz for that.
Summer brought assholes: some fun ones, but mostly Noreen and Laney’s brother.
Gabriella and Chen, Ioanna and Bill, Tom and himself, too much Shane, Clara, Annette.

Novel

The first time he stared down a barrel it was his fingers cradling that clot of steel, and I do mean stare down, because he was sitting cross legged, the pistol was in his lap, he watched both his thumbs flutter around the stiff trigger. It was very awkward. Through thin shorts, he could feel the pebbled grip press heavily against his dick. He was very awkward. He remembers the long whitish stalks of summer grass, swaying around him, broken under him, itching his shins and thick thighs. He remembers an overwhelming sense of boredom, and intuits now a lack of imagination that makes him pity that boy even more.

Water is colorless when seen from the air. Odd. The patches the eye sees grow baroque as they pass upside-down through experiential knowledge, where they’re woven into gowns for the heart. Reflecting, he decides he would steal again. Reflecting, he sees he mistook the play he was in for seduction. Normal touch, it is said, reminds the body where it ends.

A limp quip begetting polite laughter begetting chimp laughter begetting a long howl of pain. Who will come and find him when he builds his cabin? Buds burst like bustiers on the twigs of May. Gravid elk strip the sapling apples. A clod of blue sky rinses his eyes. He will figure out how to make that borscht.

Say lines of plane trees mill the air into bronze. Of the accordions along the dusty boulevard, too few would wheeze the boredom of summer light. The difficulty of comparing a strong, noble horse, with a jade, has wilted his courage. In a late twist, too late in fact, he may discover the troubadours were cruelly deceived about love.

A scraggly dun with high withers stares down the coast road, where rugged islets unzip the rolling waves. Above, light melts through woolen clouds. How could he be homesick? He has his habits. He lives inside them.


Two by Two

The thing and its spirit.
The foot and the wit.
The sweat of the brow,
wherefore and how.
The rifle, bridle, prick, peak.
Your forest eyes, that leak.
That warm North Face
gone “without a trace.”
Not Eight 1/2,
but Uncle Rich’s laugh;
months of rain, neatsfoot oil,
leftover chicken in foil.
An hecatomb.
The middles of poems.
You, you, you, you.
Pokémon Red and Blue.
Jesse Owens’ fist,
dad’s briefs in a twist.
Sim and Greta, Meena and Todd,
Campari, rosemary, ice, god.
Cliffs of flowering broom.
And what you assume I shall assume.
CBD and an embroidered coat,
the scurry of footnotes,
control.
That hole.
Beasts clean and unclean,
birds, coffee, Dramamine.
The strangeness of time.
The grape, then the vine.



The Complete Stories

Skirt leaves gone orange or torn away to reveal thorny branches, tops still flaming green
though their drowning climbed up them, the windbreak poplars glittered inverted
a moment on the flooded field until the clouds reknit and the wind. An empty road emerged
from the pools, almost touched the house. Quebec stretched to the horizon.

There were four of us but you were the one I passed the hours with.
In the long slow game, I bound you intricately to yourself with cotton ropes
and picked you up, and set you down on the carpet so I could nap.
The code is loose, therefore the sentence harsh.

Most of my life I would not believe the heart of life was making pasta
with a few people, sipping maybe two glasses of wine. In the evenings, when I was a child,
I played chess and backgammon with my father. To his credit, he never let me win.

We took a poll: most thought it was before midnight still. Talking can do that, make
a little time feel like a lot, or a lot a little, or both, in a way that makes
one feel pleasure, or loneliness, or a mix of these and many other emotions.

Edition details

• Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
• Publication date: 2021
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1556596162
• ISBN 13: 9781556596162
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 96