{"id":4015,"date":"2013-09-05T21:16:56","date_gmt":"2013-09-05T21:16:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fourwaybooks.com\/site\/?page_id=4015"},"modified":"2022-11-08T13:17:41","modified_gmt":"2022-11-08T18:17:41","slug":"home-by-now","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/fourwaybooks.com\/site\/home-by-now\/","title":{"rendered":"Home By Now"},"content":{"rendered":"

[column col=”1\/4″]\"Home<\/a><\/p>\n

paper \u2022 80 pages \u2022 15.95
\nISBN-13:\u00a0978-1-884800-94-8<\/p>\n

Add to Cart<\/a><\/p>\n

[\/column]<\/p>\n

Home By Now<\/em><\/h1>\n

Meg Kearney<\/h2>\n

A Malcolm McDonald Series Selection<\/em><\/p>\n

Winner of the 2010 L.L. Winship\/PEN\u00a0New England Award in Poetry<\/em><\/p>\n

The Speakers of Home By Now<\/em>, Meg Kearney\u2019s gritty second collection of poems, travel the shadows and edges of modern life, \u201cseducing\u201d would-be parents at the orphanage, waiting for news from surgeons performing a heart bypass, tending bar and their own alcoholism in the tinged days of Code Orange. \u201cWho needs TV drama? This \/ is life in the volcano. This is as cold as it gets,\u201d asks one speaker, remembering first blow-jobs and two-day benders in high school. With one foot in the rural and another in the urban, this collection settles in neither: \u201cI don\u2019t romanticize \/ country life, am no longer the kind \/of poet to put words in the beaks \/ of birds,\u201d Kearney writes, describing a hawk flown against a window in terms that \u201cdon\u2019t \/\/ speak of suicide flights \/ into buildings.\u201d Her sudden linebreaks generate suspense and impetus, carving gripping poems you can\u2019t look away from for an instant, no matter how distressing or inevitable their ending offers to be.<\/p>\n

The characters we hear from and watch are searching for homes\u2014in bars and cities, in the country, elsewhere; the tough wisdom they learn through abandonments is that home, once found, can dissolve without warning. In the \u201cThe Prodigal Father\u201d the speaker \u201ccan\u2019t go back, can\u2019t gas up the old Ford \/ Fairlane\u201d; another character, reflecting on his Scottish roots, ponders how \u201clove, like hunger, \/\/ is a covetous ache for a feast just \/ out of reach.\u201d None of these speakers emerge unscathed from abandonment, the way their world has collapsed about them: the amputee looking outside on September 12, 2001, \u201cinsists \/ her legs are still \/ down there \/\/ She feels them \/ burning.\u201d Self-destruction jostles with the loss of loved ones and the unraveling of dreams: \u201cShe knew herself well enough to say \/ no to a place that shared a parking lot \/ with a bar. She knew, scribbling the deposit \/ check.\u201d These unflinching poems remind us we are telling stories about our past, present, and future, and that we often end up living those fictions.<\/p>\n

About the Author<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[column col=”1\/4″] paper \u2022 80 pages \u2022 15.95 ISBN-13:\u00a0978-1-884800-94-8 Add to Cart [\/column] Home By Now Meg Kearney A Malcolm McDonald Series Selection Winner of the 2010 L.L. Winship\/PEN\u00a0New England Award in Poetry The Speakers of Home By Now, Meg Kearney\u2019s gritty second collection of poems, travel the shadows and edges of modern life, \u201cseducing\u201d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-4015","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fourwaybooks.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4015","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fourwaybooks.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fourwaybooks.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fourwaybooks.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fourwaybooks.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4015"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/fourwaybooks.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4015\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18496,"href":"https:\/\/fourwaybooks.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4015\/revisions\/18496"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fourwaybooks.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4015"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}