Suitor - Softcover

Rivkin, Joshua

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1597098582 ISBN 13: 9781597098588

Publisher: Red Hen Press, 2020

Synopsis

At the heart of Joshua Rivkin’s debut collection Suitor is a profound wrestling with desire, history, and the big questions of how we make and perform a self in the world. In conversation with the confessional tradition, Suitor begins with a sequence of poems about a mother’s boyfriends and lovers, and how these relationships inform the speaker’s own understanding about eros and masculinity. At the center of the book is a lyric essay, “The Haber Problem,” that moves beyond the self and personal history to retell the story of the scientist Fritz Haber. Later sequences and poems reflect on the past with erotic directness, longing, and lyric intensity. With grace and honesty, the poems of Suitor ask what it means to be a suitor in the fullest sense—to follow, to pursue, to chase the inexplicable hunger at the heart of desire.

About this title

About the Author

Joshua Rivkin is the author of Chalk: The Art and Erasure of Cy Twombly, a New York Times Book Review editor’s choice and finalist for 2019 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography and the Marfield Prize, the National Award for Arts Writing. His poems and essays have appeared in the New Yorker, Slate, Southern Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Best New Poets. A former Fulbright Fellow in Rome, Italy, as well as a Stegner Fellow in poetry, he has received awards and scholarships from the Sustainable Arts Foundation, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Rivkin lives in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Lifeguard

 

My father is modest. He didn’t save hundreds

from drowning. Just a few dozen.

Gathered from the swell, the riptide, rough,

rough waves he carried them ashore.

 

Half-lit, he tells it again. The storm

against sky, the lifeguard without fear

alone in the water, the crowd

gathered to witness.

 

                        Here’s what to notice:

the danger of weather, failures

            of the other people to help, we never know

            what happened to the boy.

 

This is my humble brag, my bravado,

my foolish affection

to write the same poem year after year.

In some versions I am the lifeguard.

In others I’m drowning.

Then I’m sky. Then wave.

 

 

 

 

from The Suitors

 

 

My mother’s third boyfriend owned a Peugeot

he let me drive over the Choptank River Bridge.

He wore cedar aftershave and a camelhair coat.

He opened his framing shop for business

almost every Tuesday and Wednesday afternoon.

 

            He told me adult jokes, bought me a racing kite,

took me out with golf buddies

who drank G&Ts and would bet on anything—

chip shots, baseball games, the cup size

of the waitresses at the Hole-in-One.

 

Once, for a costume party, he dressed as a pimp.

Gold chains, leather coat, a peacock

feather tucked in the hat’s band.

He came over in blackface.

My mother wore fishnets,

a tight red dress, matching lipstick,

blue-cloud eye shadow.

 

His shoe polish skin, her fever dress,

our family on the front lawn—

there is no way to catalog or camouflage

this moment. I’ve tried. It’s like a kite

caught in a tree high above ground

and there’s no way to bring it down

without breaking it or the branches.

Edition details

• Publisher: Red Hen Press
• Publication date: 2020
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1597098582
• ISBN 13: 9781597098588
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 88