The Book of Goodbyes (5 page)
Read The Book of Goodbyes Online
Authors: Jillian Weise
“The Ugly Law”: Italicized text comes from an 1881 municipal ordinance, as cited in Susan M. Schweik's
The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public
(NYU Press). Chicago was the last city to repeal its Ugly Law in 1974.
“How to Treat Flowers” quotes Spinoza's
Ethics
, Part III, Prop. 59, as translated by Edwin Curley (Penguin Classics), and draws on C. S. Lewis' chapter “Time and Beyond Time” from
Mere Christianity
(HarperCollins).
“Affairs”: This is a substitution poem based on Austin Wright's “Recalcitrance in the Short Story,” from the anthology
Short Story Theory at a Crossroads
, edited by Susan Lohafer (LSU Press). “Affairs” has been substituted for “recalcitrance.”
“Go On High Ship”: Geoffrey Grigson named Wallace Stevens “The Stuffed Goldfinch” for an eponymous review in
New Verse
.
“Elegy for Zahra Baker” engages with the case of Zahra Baker whose remains were found scattered across Caldwell County, North Carolina, in 2010.
Thanks to the editors of these journals where the poems first appeared:
Badlands
: “Poem for His Girl”;
Cave Wall
: “Go On High Ship”;
Dossier
: “Be Not Far From Me”;
Failbetter
: “How to Treat Flowers”;
Fairy Tale Review
: “Elegy for Zahra Baker”;
Forklift, Ohio
: “Tiny and Courageous Finches”;
LIT
: “Goodbyes”;
Mayday
: “Marcel Addresses Kate”;
Michigan Quarterly Review
: “Up Late and Likewise”;
The Missouri Review
: “Once I thought I was going to die in the desert without knowing who I was” and “For Big Logos, in Hopes He Will Write Poems Again”;
New Ohio Review
: “The Ugly Law”;
Pax Americana
: “Affairs” and “Decent Recipe for Tilapia”;
PEN American Poetry Series
: “Poem for His Ex”;
Pleiades
: “I've Been Waiting All Night”;
Tin House
: “Semi Semi Dash”;
Wordgathering
: “Café Loop”.
Thanks to Peter Conners, Laure-Anne Bosselaar, and Michael Blumenthal, to the ghost of Isabella Gardner, and to the BOA staff. Thanks to the Fulbright Program, the Universidad de Buenos Aires, and Delfina Muschietti for the fellowship and friendship. Thanks to Ana Lopez at the Patagonia Spanish School for making Ushuaia a less lonely place to live. Thanks to Clemson University, the Fine Arts Work Center, and the University of Cincinnati for grants and residencies to support these poems.
Thanks to these writers for their insights on the manuscript: Tom Bissell, Sarah Blackman, Don Bogen, Jim Cummins, John Drury, Tim Earley, Okla Elliott, Michael Griffith, Joanie Mackowski, Kristi Maxwell, Bo McGuire, Catherine Paul, Michelle Santamaria, Craig Morgan Teicher, Gary Weissman, and Thomas Yagoda. Much love for my parents, Doug and Donna Weise.
Jillian Weise is the author of
The Amputee's Guide to Sex
,
The Colony
, and
The Book of Goodbyes
, winner of the 2013 Isabella Gardner Poetry Award. Her work has appeared in
The Atlantic
,
The New York Times
, and
Tin House
. Weise has received fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Fulbright Program, the Sewanee Writers Conference, and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She is an Assistant Professor at Clemson University.
No. 1 | The Fuhrer Bunker: A Cycle of Poems in Progress |
No. 2 | She |
No. 3 | Living With Distance |
No. 4 | Not Just Any Death |
No. 5 | That Was Then: New and Selected Poems |
No. 6 | Things That Happen Where There Aren't Any People |
No. 7 | The Bridge of Change: Poems 1974â1980 |
No. 8 | Signatures |
No. 9 | People Live Here: Selected Poems 1949â1983 |
No. 10 | Yin |
No. 11 | Duhamel: Ideas of Order in Little Canada |
No. 12 | Seeing It Was So |
No. 13 | Hyam Plutzik: The Collected Poems |
No. 14 | Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir 1969â1980 |
No. 15 | Next: New Poems |
No. 16 | Roxa: Voices of the Culver Family |
No. 17 | John Logan: The Collected Poems |
No. 18 | Isabella Gardner: The Collected Poems |
No. 19 | The Sunken Lightship |
No. 20 | The City in Which I Love You |
No. 21 | Quilting: Poems 1987â1990 |
No. 22 | John Logan: The Collected |
No. 23 | Shenandoah and Other Verse Plays |
No. 24 | Nobody Lives on Arthur Godfrey Boulevard |
No. 25 | The Book of Names: New and Selected Poems |
No. 26 | Each in His Season |
No. 27 | Wordworks: Poems Selected and New |
No. 28 | What We Carry |
No. 29 | Red Suitcase |
No. 30 | Song |
No. 31 | The Fuehrer Bunker: The Complete Cycle |
No. 32 | For the Kingdom |
No. 33 | The Quicken Tree |
No. 34 | These Upraised Hands |
No. 35 | Crazy Horse in Stillness |
No. 36 | Quick, Now, Always |
No. 37 | I Have Tasted the Apple |
No. 38 | The Terrible Stories |
No. 39 | The Heat of Arrivals |
No. 40 | Jimmy & Rita |
No. 41 | Green Ash, Red Maple, Black Gum |
No. 42 | Against Distance |
No. 43 | The Night Path |
No. 44 | Radiography |
No. 45 | At My Ease: Uncollected Poems of the Fifties and Sixties |
No. 46 | Trillium |
No. 47 | Fuel |
No. 48 | Gratitude |
No. 49 | Diana, Charles, & the Queen |
No. 50 | Plus Shipping |
No. 51 | Cabato Sentora |
No. 52 | We Didn't Come Here for This |
No. 53 | The Vandals |
No. 54 | To Get Here |
No. 55 | Living Is What I Wanted: Last Poems |
No. 56 | Dusty Angel |
No. 57 | The Tiger Iris |
No. 58 | White City |
No. 59 | Laugh at the End of the World: Collected Comic Poems 1969â1999 |
No. 60 | Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems: 1988â2000 |
No. 61 | Tell Me |
No. 62 | Smoke |
No. 63 | Parthenopi: New and Selected Poems |
No. 64 | Rancho Notorious |
No. 65 | Jam |
No. 66 | A. Poulin, Jr. Selected Poems |
No. 67 | Small Gods of Grief |
No. 68 | Book of My Nights |
No. 69 | Tulip Farms and Leper Colonies |
No. 70 | Double Going |
No. 71 | What He Took |
No. 72 | The Hawk Temple at Tierra Grande |
No. 73 | Mules of Love |
No. 74 | The Guests at the Gate |
No. 75 | Dumb Luck |
No. 76 | Love Song with Motor Vehicles |
No. 77 | Life Watch |
No. 78 | The Owner of the House: New Collected Poems 1940â2001 |
No. 79 | Is |
No. 80 | Late |
No. 81 | Precipitates |
No. 82 | The Orchard |
No. 83 | Bright Hunger |
No. 84 | Desire Lines: New and Selected Poems |
No. 85 | Curious Conduct |
No. 86 | Mercy |
No. 87 | Model Homes |
No. 88 | Farewell to the Starlight in Whiskey |
No. 89 | Angels for the Burning |
No. 90 | The Rooster's Wife |
No. 91 | American Children |
No. 92 | Postcards from the Interior |
No. 93 | You & Yours |
No. 94 | Consideration of the Guitar: New and Selected Poems 1986â2005 |
No. 95 | Off-Season in the Promised Land |
No. 96 | The Hoopoe's Crown |
No. 97 | Not for Specialists: New and Selected Poems |
No. 98 | Splendor |
No. 99 | Woman Crossing a Field |
No. 100 | The Burning of Troy |
No. 101 | Darling Vulgarity |
No. 102 | The Persistence of Objects |
No. 103 | Slope of the Child Everlasting |
No. 104 | Broken Hallelujahs |
No. 105 | Peeping Tom's Cabin: Comic Verse 1928â2008 |
No. 106 | Disclamor |
No. 107 | Encouragement for a Man Falling to His Death |
No. 108 | Sleeping with Houdini |
No. 109 | Nomina |
No. 110 | The Fortieth Day |
No. 111 | Elephants & Butterflies |
No. 112 | Voices |
No. 113 | The Moon Makes Its Own Plea |
No. 114 | The Heaven-Sent Leaf |
No. 115 | Struggling Times |
No. 116 | And |
No. 117 | Carpathia |
No. 118 | Seasons of Lotus, Seasons of Bone |
No. 119 | Sharp Stars |
No. 120 | Cool Auditor |
No. 121 | Long Lens: New and Selected Poems |
No. 122 | Chaos Is the New Calm |
No. 123 | Diwata |
No. 124 | Burning of the Three Fires |
No. 125 | Sasha Sings the Laundry on the Line |
No. 126 | Your Father on the Train of Ghosts |
No. 127 | Ennui Prophet |
No. 128 | Transfer |
No. 129 | Gospel Night |
No. 130 | The Hands of Strangers: Poems from the Nursing Home |
No. 131 | Kingdom Animalia |
No. 132 | True Faith |
No. 133 | The Reindeer Camps and Other Poems |
No. 134 | The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton: 1965â2010 |
No. 135 | To Keep Love Blurry |
No. 136 | Theophobia |
No. 137 | Refuge |
No. 138 | The Book of Goodbyes |