Miraculous Courageous

Josh Booton

• Publisher: Parlor Press, LLC
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781602354470
• eBook ISBN: 9781602354487
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

The Miraculous Courageous is a fractured epic, a sequence which seeks not to explain but to evoke the mind of one boy and his experience with autism. In the tradition of Carson's Autobiography of Red, Booton constructs a landscape both familiar and uncanny, a territory where our inner workings burn with the luminosity of jellyfish and "darkness turns the lighthouse on." These poems are agile, slippery, glancing at the camera then quickly away, skewing the boundaries between lyric and monologue, vignette and scene. These poems are a bridge. And through their deft conflation of inner and outer worlds, the self and the other, The Miraculous Courageous marks a rich and startling immersion in the mind of autism.

Table of contents

• Front cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Epigraph
• the books all quote my brain is wrong
• in my first memory mom is crying
• anthony says seahorses are gay but
• this is where we shakehands stare
• the seahorse isn’t a real horse
• my mom said don’t always go on
• today we practice asking questions
• the moon is the ocean’s clock
• the seahorse can hardly swim though
• tell me about your friends she says
• weather wrecks everything here grays
• I like tangerines no. 2 pencils sharpened
• how was it Jacques diving under
• today we practice telling jokes but
• this is my collection of brokenmachines
• anthony said snap out of it says you can’t
• if you put an ocean seahorse in a tank
• we are all detectives she said searching
• I like the sound of yelling faraway
• mom says the leaves eat light she says
• there’s one thing I don’t understand
• it doesn’t hurt as much as you
• people on tv are crying again because
• if divers shine waterlights on them
• there are places so dark at the bottom
• the clouds right now are cumulonimbus
• sometimes a shock runs through me
• I built one once from two two liters
• are there species Jacques even you
• today we practice reading emotions
• frogs aren’t full of clockparts guts
• the sun arrives too many strangers
• you’re a good listener you never say
• anthony says it’s my fault says he left
• when I was young younger when
• he didn’t really mean you’re a genius
• the waves are too high today to swim
• I’ll find one once all my own but not
• they’re not helpless they can hide
• goldfish don’t have memories
• the trees outside my window scratch
• in another memory my brother slips
• freshwater tiger tail thorny
• we are making a memory mom says we are
• anthony said a man talks with his fists
• today we practice listening keeping
• impossible notions are the only ones
• who knows why they’re called hands
• my shirttag is the only thought
• the bluffs are covered with names
• something in the light in the way
• are you ever lonely Jacques below
• every clock in the house shines
• the gulls make circles over nothing
• I would be green the yellowygreen
• amazing they don’t get pulverized
• I did it last night in the bathtub Jacques
• today we practice saying goodbye
• the ocean takes an inch each year
• last night I dreamed I was a seahorse
• Acknowledgments
• Free Verse Editions
• About the Author