Earth Again

Chris Dombrowski

• Publisher: Wayne State University Press
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9780814337301
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Poetry
• Index: Literature

Stirring meditations on living with a strong connection to the environment, both physical and psychological.

The second full-length collection from award-winning poet Chris Dombrowski, Earth Again transports readers to an imaginative world where identity is explored and expanded. With a mixture of long poems and shorter pieces, Dombrowski probes birth, death, sex, memory, and our blessed but treacherous engagement with the natural world. While he writes from a number of points of view and employs both male and female speakers, much of the collection's singular insight centers around masculine identity and being a husband and a father. Readers come away transformed, "like the land / gasping as it does each late winter evening when / the sky at tree line, nearly sapphiric, goes black, " as these poems prove Dombrowski to be a truly original American voice.

Comprised of three sections—each of which concludes with a long poem— Earth Again presents a range of narrative and emotions in dexterous rhythms, unexpected shifts, and unforgettable metaphors. Dombrowksi introduces readers to arresting images like "the parataxis of her ass, " "cerulean, alchemical light, " "Molly with the sun in her mouth, " and "labyrinthine, lanky-stemmed, dew-magnified" leaves. These details combine with Dombrowski's note-perfect language, which alternates between the most colloquial and the most elevated of diction. Readers will be challenged to consider spirituality alongside Scooby-Doo Band-aids, and to meditate on death after the mower has chewed up a plastic dinosaur, as Dombrowski revels in exploring our connection to the environment and one another.

Fans of Dombrowski's previous collection, By Cold Water (which was noted as a contemporary poetry bestseller by the Poetry Foundation in 2009), along with other poets and poetry lovers will appreciate the attention to detail and the imaginative intensity of the poems in Earth Again.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Tablet
• Possible Psalm
• Serotonin
• Or a Woman
• Brief Dream of Bronwyn Rae
• Poem Written in the Heliopause
• Eavesdripping Hour, Sunday Afternoon
• My Recently Implanted Gov’t Eco Guilt Chip
• In the Weeks before You Were Born, Driving through the Mission Valley, He Watches Her Begin a List for Labor
• Vows
• Blown Snow
• Strange Lullaby
• Not Knowledge
• Sustenance
• Partial Eclipse N 46.677, W 114.244
• Windowsill
• Tarnation
• Weekly Apocalyptic or Poem Written on the Wall in an Ascending Space Capsule
• May
• That Blue
• I Canonize Dick Curran
• They Tied the Madmen to Trees beside the River and All the Shrinks Went Out of Business
• Ghazal in Which End Word Repetition Is Implied
• Inscription
• September Miniatures with Blood and Mars
• The Taxidermist’s Answers
• Hammock Poem
• Stubborn Poem
• Nostrums (Bill Monroe)
• Things Boys Paint
• Comes to Worse
• February Sidereal with Backyard Doe
• Still Life with Starlight
• Study for Acrylic of Sleeman Peak Dusk with Wildflowers
• Poem with Several Keatsian References, Poem Burning Up in the Fire I Lit to Warm My Son, or Do as I Say Not as I Do
• Wintering
• Fluvial
• The Roofers Listen to Heart’s “Crazy on You” as They Work
• Vespers Beginning as Sheep Tallow in the Hands of a Priest
• The Forbidden
• Small Fire in Snow
• Naïve Melody
• Grove
• Trimmings
• A Toast
• Notes
• Acknowledgments