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70 pages

English

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Description

A collection born of polyphony and the rhythms of our cosmos—intimate in its stakes, celestial in its dreams.

Tethered to Stars inhabits the deductive tongue of astronomy, the oracular throat of astrology, and the living language of loss and desire. With an analytical eye and a lyrical heart, Fady Joudah shifts deftly between the microscope, the telescope, and sometimes even the horoscope. His gaze lingers on the interior space of a lung, on a butterfly poised on a filament, on the moon temple atop Huayna Picchu, on a dismembered live oak. In each lingering, Joudah shares with readers the palimpsest of what makes us human: “We are other worms / for other silk roads.” The solemn, the humorous, the erotic, the transcendent—all of it, in Joudah’s poems, steeped in the lexicon of the natural world. “When I say honey,” says one lover, “I’m asking you whose pollen you contain.” “And when I say honey,” replies another, “you grip my sweetness / on your life, stigma and anthophile.”

Teeming with life but tinged with a sublime proximity to death, Tethered to Stars is a collection that flows “between nuance and essentialization,” from one of our most acclaimed poets.
Contents

Canopus

Taurus

Leo

The Holy Embraces the Holy

Pisces

Every Hour Has an Animal

Problems of Moon Language

Sandra Bland, Texas

Neon

Listening Suture

Syzygy

Unacknowledged Pollinators

Solstice

Descending, Rising

Oxygen

Carbon Copies

Cancer

Blue Shift

Calligraphy for a Sagittarius

Mausoleum for a Scorpio

Equinox

Isomers & Isotopes

Aquarius

Elegy for a Kaleidoscope

Capricorn

House of Mercury

Postcard from a Virgo

Gemini

Domicile, House, Cusp

Aries

Three Leaps of the Gazelle

Black Hole

Libra

The Old Lady and the House

Altair

Event Horizon

Sirius

Year of the Metal Dog

&

Venus Cycle

Sujets

divination

Middle Eastern

contemporary

health

América

21st century

Asian American

Loss

Middle East

Poetry

Palestine

American

Grief

Death

Nature

Informations

Publié par	Milkweed Editions
Date de parution	09 mars 2021
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781571317315
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0500€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Tethered
to
Stars
ALSO BY FADY JOUDAH
Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance
Textu
Alight
The Earth in the Attic
Tethered
to
Stars
poems
FADY JOUDAH
MILKWEED EDITIONS
2021, Text by Fady Joudah
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher: Milkweed Editions, 1011 Washington Avenue South, Suite 300, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55415 (800) 520-6455
milkweed.org
Published 2021 by Milkweed Editions
Printed in Canada
Cover design by Mary Austin Speaker
Cover art by Gervasio Troche
21 22 23 24 25 5 4 3 2 1
First Edition
Milkweed Editions, an independent nonprofit publisher, gratefully acknowledges sustaining support from our Board of Directors; the Alan B. Slifka Foundation and its president, Riva Ariella Ritvo-Slifka; the Amazon Literary Partnership; the Ballard Spahr Foundation; Copper Nickel; the McKnight Foundation; the National Endowment for the Arts; the National Poetry Series; the Target Foundation; and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. Also, this activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund. For a full listing of Milkweed Editions supporters, please visit milkweed.org .

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Joudah, Fady, 1971- author.
Title: Tethered to stars : poems / Fady Joudah.
Description: First Edition. | Minneapolis, Minnesota : Milkweed Editions, [2021] | Summary: From Fady Joudah, an elegant collection of poems that shifts deftly between the microscope, the telescope, and the horoscope --Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020038692 (print) | LCCN 2020038693 (ebook) | ISBN 9781571315342 (paperback) | ISBN 9781571317315 (ebook)
Subjects: LCGFT: Poetry.
Classification: LCC PS3610.O679 T45 2021 (print) | LCC PS3610.O679 (ebook) | DDC 811/.6--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020038692
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020038693
Milkweed Editions is committed to ecological stewardship. We strive to align our book production practices with this principle and to reduce the impact of our operations in the environment. We are a member of the Green Press Initiative, a nonprofit coalition of publishers, manufacturers, and authors working to protect the world s endangered forests and conserve natural resources. Tethered to Stars was printed on acid-free 100% postconsumer-waste paper by Friesens Corporation.
For M, Z, H.
Contents
Canopus
Taurus
Leo
The Holy Embraces the Holy
Pisces
Every Hour Has an Animal
Problems of Moon Language
Sandra Bland, Texas
Neon
Listening Suture
Dehiscence
Syzygy
Unacknowledged Pollinators
Solstice
Descending, Rising
Oxygen
Carbon Copies
Cancer
Blue Shift
Calligraphy for a Sagittarius
Mausoleum for a Scorpio
Equinox
Isomers Isotopes
Aquarius
Elegy for a Kaleidoscope
Capricorn
House of Mercury
Postcard from a Virgo
Gemini
Domicile, House, Cusp
Aries
Three Leaps of the Gazelle
Black Hole
Libra
The Old Lady and the House
Altair
Event Horizon
Sirius
Year of the Metal Dog

Venus Cycle
Acknowledgment Notes
A night like sea waves drapes
me with all sorts of trouble.
A night whose stars are tethered
to solid stone with linen ropes.
IMRU AL-QAIS (6TH CENTURY A.D)
Canopus
Be an owl,
not even a sunflower
turns its head
270 degrees,
but may the need to ask me
about my darkness
never command you.
Be a sunflower,
grow old to face east,
warm in the morning,
kind to insects and bees,
and may our overlap
be two: light and light
in mouths that vary
the ninety-nine
names for snow.
Taurus
Comparing miseries isn t a road to happiness,
and as things stand, I m ready
to distract my Lazarus,
whatever catatonia or narcolepsy plays him
dead. Return
is a dish best served as stealth-we re not birds
but we can catch ourselves on trees, or
if I ask as a dog
I ask openly for love. Write it: what s there to lose?
Out in the world we re with others in it
and representation is addiction
to the blues we want to eradicate but then
lichens us to boulders. What is the wavelength
of euphoria? What slit diffracts praise?
And if I walk away from you is it from the edge
of a shallow lake? Did I from the cage
of those who can t lung my words
unless in the shadow of a stranger tongue?
We re not birds but light
after sound, maybe chimera or hermaphrodite, sound
after light. Last week a Chinese oracle told me
our health will suffer precipitous decline
before we age well.
Leo
Do you think we ll ever get butterflies to lay eggs
in our backyard after what I did to the caterpillars
on the lemon tree?
I think you inhaled some of the larva on that tree
and they got to your head.
Or my gut. They matured, migrated up
my esophagus, slid down into my lungs, secreting a cough
reflex suppressant as the worms hung upside down
like bats, my alveoli their makeshift cocoons.
You d better extract that cough syrup soon,
it ll be a sensation over-the-counter.
The newly formed butterflies would gently ride my exhalations
but not all would survive the exodus.
You probably wouldn t either. Your chest might explode
or you might implode with asphyxiation.
Maybe. And maybe the butterflies are vested
in preserving their host.
You d like that, wouldn t you? Whenever you open your mouth
a butterfly enchants us.
The Holy Embraces the Holy
1.
That you have nothing to say,
your deep sadness reserves me
as a den reserves a security blanket.
That in the mirror I see you. You were not there.
Your silence was a mask.
I read from it.
2.
The studies done so far
have not been good studies. We agree:
more research is needed, more money allocated,
so that we practice what we return to when we say,
don t judge me. I took LSD once.
I experienced no visual or auditory hallucinations.
The drop possibly had no drop in it.
Or maybe the vendor thought to protect my friend
a young medical doctor then, from herself.
Or she overpaid. Or the hit was a gift.
We went hiking. There was a rattlesnake
and I heard what it had to say.
April snow was melting in Zion National Park,
we had no wet or dry suites. I saw two currents meet,
one held off the other: at the interface
a mirror. God s face in slo-mo plumes
of dirt and gravel. Then in a self-contained
area blinded by a bluff we came across
a woman calling out to Bob.
He was her husband, she said.
She could have been Japanese,
had an accent as I have an accent
with certain names. We offered her a few discerning
glances into the woods before my friend whispered
one of Zeno s paradoxes to me:
which story did we want to see
through on acid?
4.
Six months later in Paracas, with the same friend,
before I became the son of the mother who loved me
or loved me not, we visited the national park on the Pacific.
The resort was where stone desert is alive with sea
and no greenery negotiated life. Mindfully we went about
acquiring more debt: dinner was included,
but we didn t have enough for lunch or breakfast.
Complimentary tea or coffee with warm bread
and rolls of salted butter was what the Queen said we could eat.
By the third morning, we went for the gratis like it was a jugular.
5.
That your sadness was a silence
and your silence no mask.
That you have become epic,
no chronology sustains you.
6.
In Paracas I shroomed. No hallucination.
My grip on reality was wicked. The waves
delivered the gust to shore and I summoned
my magic carpet, straddled it like a bike,
my tiptoes on the ground. On the cliffs a fleet
of red condors pulled out their panopticons for the seals
a hundred meters below. The wind was an exalted rubble
off the edge. With their wingspan some condors rose