paper • 76 pages • 15.95
ISBN-13: 978-1-935536-60-4
Boys of My Youth
Rebecca Okrent
In these poems Rebecca Okrent rescues significance from the ordinary accumulation of days and losses that mark the passage of time, recapturing for herself and for her reader the reverence felt in childhood when everything held meaning. The poems emerge from moments when nature or experience insist: “I have something to tell you.” Okrent rides the tide of mourning to arrive on solid ground, and celebrates the stillness that comes with slack tide: “All is becalmed in a suspension / of time before the tide’s turning. / The world’s abyssal intake of breath, / then lamentation.”
“Danse Macabre”, from Boys of My Youth:
Daylight is ferocious, tears at intention as a lioness her kill, so by nightfall resolve is a carcass, again you wreath remains in smoke and ashes, bleach the bones in bourbon smut your face in entrails and pronounce the layers of dark you fall through beautiful. About the Author