Hesitating Once to Feel Glory

Maleea Acker

• Publisher: Nightwood Editions
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780889714144
• eBook ISBN: 9780889714151
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Canadian Poetry
• Index: Literature

Maleea Acker's dauntless new poetry collection is crafted with emotion and bold style.

Any day now I shall be released to the Bangladesh runaway,
its burnt out plane a little hulk from a different dimension,

a researcher of longing, no one selling Heineken
from a cooler in its unlit aisles, no one with a line to God.

Acker's poems hang on precipices of emotion. They cartwheel from sadness to glory, then break into blossoms in a drought-struck landscape of longing. These are poems filled with daring leaps and precise, deft metaphors. There is machinery, there are imaginaries; a dictator selects the musical soundtrack. The poems cajole and praise both the world and interior life with an erotic charge and enduring hope.

Open When Alone

Hello, old feeling. It’s not been long enough.

Access to the central holding facility of joy has been curtailed

for all those not in a pool or cutting pine

with an antiquated saw. Pendejo, call the boys, while a love song

croons, its accordionist high on playing the straight man. Again

and again, the flicker into new territory, then out

to alight like Napoleon the hummingbird on the chain-link, just inside

the zone of ownership. Every time he flies past he takes

another handful of dust off my body. By tomorrow, just

the sheen of mechanicality, like how a swimming pool changes

from turquoise to white smear when used as it should. Little

voice, you’re like those coloured flags planted atop the next

to furthest jungled hill. It will never be easy, say your flickering

oyster-shell forms. You’ll never get out of this alive. Another love song concurs. And

I’m hungry and cold, adds the singer, her armies all

burned at the edge of the city. Give me the pass, I whisper

to the little voice. You can have my first-born, my money,

the almond croissant I’m eating by pieces to pretend I’m not eating

the whole thing. You can have the North’s lotus-eaters

the dark firs and my moon rising with Pluto, poor Pluto,

in one of twelve houses, which was told to me this morning but because I

am without any earth apparently leaves my head immediately.

I see a bare arm gleam at the pool’s edge and think I

might just believe in Innisfree, in the guillotine operator

shading his eyes, seeing his wife, hooking the leather strap to hold the

metal blade before stepping off the wood platform through the crowd.

I am tired and volcanic. I would never have made a good Penelope.

I’d have taken the suitors one by one on the infinite cushions

of the daybed with its view of the sea, then had them

brutalized by dogs. One of the boys paddles to the concrete

edge of the water, levers out to his waist, then falls back in,

he does this again and again and it is the most pleasurable

thing in the world, obviously, to use

himself between mediums like this to be

briefly, perfectly, both latch and key.

El Dictador

Sometimes I think he is all of us. Sitting on the tailgates of our cars

in the tumbling light, staring out at the weighted storm that will not

pass overhead but slant south missing us, a lodestone of the berry farms,

pine forests, the volcano that coughs. Playing each track as a balm.

There was that moment, sang Shirley Horn, when my heart,

sitting beside the back tire, beat wildly against its instrument case. When

the white bird picked its way closer and ate...

Table of contents

• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Tripe and Cake
• Tacos
• The Trumpet Speaks to the Crowd
• The Whole Fish
• Interiors
• Hesitating Once to Feel Glory
• Favourite Things
• The Dictator
• Approximate a Singular Feeling
• Hovercraft
• Fealty of the Short, Dark Feeling
• Coming to Pieces
• The Dictator Before the Rainy Season
• Airless Wonder
• The Thirteen-Year Sleep
• Ardent
• Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church
• Automatic Pilot
• Geodes
• Voyeur
• A Shadow No Matter How It Tries Cannot Turn to Gold
• Ten Thousand Concordances and One Thousand Illustrations
• Open When Alone
• El Dictador
• Miraculous Failure
• Fitzgerald
• Chesterman
• Love
• Grace
• Curtain
• Levitation
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author