paper • 72 pages • 16.95
ISBN-13: 978-1-945588-87-7

Hotel

Carl Adamshick

Adamshick’s poems are characteristically accessible and navigable. From the political to the erotic and everywhere in between, these poems take us on a sometimes sober, sometimes raunchy ride.

AFTER THE ELECTION

I receive a letter from the future.
It assures me everything
will be fine, that you and I
will share a meal with friends,
that one of us will open a book,
read a soft passage concerned
with the body and we will all,
somehow, feel a little closer.
I crawl back beneath blankets.
Nothing disappears or goes away.
Clouds under the light rally.
I predict heavy rain in the headlights
of parked cars, the day as it is—
a record stuck in its ending.
Alone in the bed’s thick shadow
I draft a truce with the world
that will forever remain unread
and unsigned. Silence reflecting
a kind of madness—looking
within the dim corridors of being.
And for what, to see the citizens
of a small city stalled for a moment
at dusk with the pain of certainty
etched on their faces.

About the Author

Past Praise from Publisher's Weekly
Past Praise by Stephanie Adam-Santos in The Oregonian

“. . . ‘His bicycle / black on the grass / black on the towpath / one pedal dug into the earth / black in the fallen leaves.’ Adamshick’s poems are most compelling in moments like this, in which an image stands on its own, generating possibilities for interpretation. . . .”
“. . . It’s impossible to read this book without faltering, without staggering. The title of black snow that visits us again and again throughout the book has the invocation of Celán’s black milk, and in the ecstatic silence of the work as a whole, one feels the haunted presence of Nelly Sachs—two masters whose works limn the edges of suffering. Like them, Adamshick cuts himself against that edge, and with his wound re-enters the world with the ruinous knowledge of the tragic hero: ‘if this is the world / why don’t I know / where my body ends.’”