Hosts and Guests

Poems

Nate Klug

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780691203539, 9780691203546
• eBook ISBN: 9780691203553
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

An exciting new collection from a poet whose debut was praised by Colorado Review as "a seduction by way of small astonishments"

Nate Klug has been hailed by the Threepenny Review as a poet who is "an original in Eliot's sense of the word." In Hosts and Guests, his exciting second collection, Klug revels in slippery roles and shifting environments. The poems move from a San Francisco tech bar and a band of Pokémon Go players to the Shakers and St. Augustine, as they explore the push-pull between community and solitude, and past and present. Hosts and Guests gathers an impressive range: critiques of the "immiserated quiet" of modern life, love poems and poems of new fatherhood, and studies of a restless, nimble faith. At a time when the meanings of hospitality and estrangement have assumed a new urgency, Klug takes up these themes in chiseled, musical lines that blend close observation of the natural world, social commentary, and spiritual questioning. As Booklist has observed of his work, "The visual is rendered sonically, so perfectly one wants to involve the rest of the senses, to speak the lines, to taste the syllables."

1.

MATINEE, END OF AUGUST

The several dark
where it was safe to feel

still wearing off our faces,
we stumble out
with packs of strangers

like red-eye passengers
exiting a jet,
crumbs and random warmths
scattered among the recliner seats.

The future, like a memory,
seeps back slowly:

which car, which color-coded floor …
It ought to have rained.
We’d wanted not to hurry.
But every door

to the reassembling world
knows we’re there already,
and slides open.

GHOST AT THE HY-VEE

I’d seen him just two months before—
his brother’s service, condolences
over orange juice— but when I shook Dan’s hand

between aisles, my lips spoke “Jack.”
Or Jack spoke “Jack” through me, slipping back
by vowel rhyme, and scrambling to remain

among the glint and friction of the jumbo carts,
midday’s automatic produce mists. Cheeks drained,
then flushed, believing too much at once

to speak, I glanced toward Dan, his eyes
fixed below on the ceiling fans’ reflections—
each circulating blade leaking up

through floor varnish. Returned to himself,
he laughed it off, clapping my back like a man,
like a Dan would, but more softly than that.

CHRISTMAS EVE, I-80, 10 P.M.

Tipped and stranded and sheathed in snow,
adjacent the rumble strip
a semi-trailer slumbers through
its own decomposing.
Tied with a skinny orange ribbon,

it’ll lie there how long, a sea creature’s
bleached inchoate bones
risen among the prairie’s ambered forms
and beached on an interstate ditch?
Once, an enormous seaway

ran straight through this country,
flattened a plate and filled six hundred miles
in the middle—a wide shallow avenue
seething with animals:
picture them for company in the dark,

plesiosaurs and clam-eating sharks
and the shifting bell curves of plankton
all thronging here, between Altoona
and The Lion’s Den, its lurid neon sign
newly redone, store lights still on.

HOSTS AND GUESTS

After the ID forgotten en route,
the forced deplaning thanks
to fog reports, after three thousand miles

of bladder vs. historical thriller—“still,
all in all, easier than getting to Des Moines”—
here they are again, though they’ve never been,

perched either side of our mutt
at the linty edge of the same turquoise couch.
What could we offer to repay them?

Stuffed into East Coast coats, they paw
through carry-on Kleenex, hand over a folder
of direct mail addressed to us,

interrupt to show off a new app.
Their love an ebullition
of non sequiturs and questions

fired past any chance of a response,
while you and I slip back
into randomly specific irritations,

equally unable to help ourselves.
It’s like that time we gathered to watch
an old family VHS—

the coloring a little off almost immediately,
your yellow bucket hat bleeding
into your toddler head, merging it with other heads,

while everyone on screen around you
in the kitchen laughed and cooed,
the merging getting worse the longer we tried

to keep the movie playing.
A week later, airport location
loaded on both their phones, after long hugs

goodbye (your father and I
finished first, stood looking at the sky
for several seconds), how empty

now our new apartment feels,
ransacked of their shadows, smells,
each familiar gesture’s weight. Straightening up,

we walk each room hand in hand—relieved,
but fighting off an unexpected grief,
alone as if for the first time.

EYE OF A NEEDLE

Mountain View Cemetery, Oakland

Hard to tell the mourners from the exercisers,
heads down as they fan out
from the parking circle, pistoning steep paths
beyond the columbaria,
Rihanna maybe hidden in one hand.
An open book, slab pages uncut;
a few cherubs, in need of a wash,
among the headstone crescents—then the mausoleums,
high...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• 1:
• 2:
• 3:
• 4:
• Notes
• Acknowledgments