Ballyhoo
eBook - ePub

Ballyhoo

  1. English
  2. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

Ballyhoo

About this book

A poetry collection that grapples with the tragicomic nature of language, memory, love, work, and the performative self.

Though at times whimsical and witty, the poems in Hastings Hensel's Ballyhoo inhabit the world beyond and between the punchline. In tightly controlled meditations on language's limits and its necessity, as well as on the many forms that humor takesā€”comedy, laughter, farce, clowning, parody, and moreā€”Hensel navigates fine lines between joy and sadness, jokes and cruelty, reality and illusion, and irony and sincerity.

Universal in scope, the 47 poems in Ballyhoo are richly idiomatic and evocative. They are also frequently grounded in the southern Atlantic coast with its particular ecology, characters, history, and myth. The pleasure in reading these poems comes from the original connections Hensel makes between the literary and the gritty: an elegy set in a bait shop, Twelfth Night's Feste delivering a monologue in a bar, a villanelle about a murder on a cruise ship.

These intelligent, insightful poems remind us of the frail but important relationships between comedy, memory, and identity. Ballyhoo offers a sobering examination of the tragicomic nature of the world.

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Yes, you can access Ballyhoo by Hastings Hensel in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Literature & Women in Poetry. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright Page
  4. Dedication
  5. Contents
  6. Spoiler Alert
  7. True Story, No Joke
  8. Comedy and the Uncommon Woman
  9. That Laugh You Have, or, A Study in the Via Negativa
  10. Playing Cards with Mark Strand
  11. Plot Summary
  12. Reality as Prank
  13. ā€œForgive Us Our Happinessā€
  14. Recovering the Sunk
  15. Docent
  16. Freud in 1939
  17. Mr. Hall
  18. Against Jubilance
  19. What We Need Here Is a New Dialect Noun
  20. Reading the Water
  21. Coaching the Witness
  22. Questions from the Witness
  23. Old Feste, at the Bar, Remembering
  24. On Taste
  25. Forgetting a Flood
  26. Stage Right
  27. Thinking I Wanted Country Humor
  28. At Slack Tide
  29. After Seeing Four Turtles on a Stump in the Waccamaw River
  30. Funny Farm
  31. Scraping Barnacles from the Hull
  32. The Bait Shop Elegies
  33. Pumping the Troutā€™s Stomach
  34. Storyboard
  35. At the Grave of the Fabulous Moolah
  36. The Comedian Questions Her Timing
  37. Counterpunch Lines
  38. Sea Pork
  39. Misfit, Mountain Town
  40. Sad Clown in the Woods, No Hoax
  41. Wanted: The Raccoon on the Dock
  42. Knuckleheads
  43. Ode to a Boat Mechanic
  44. Laughing Gull
  45. Wherever
  46. Hoke
  47. The Funny Pages
  48. Throwbacks
  49. As I Lay Dying Laughing
  50. Any Which Way You Cut It
  51. Nothing Liquid, Fragile, Hazardous, Perishable
  52. To a Seated Harlequin
  53. Acknowledgments