"Reading these poems is an uncanny experience. . . . We enter into this book alert to possibility, and leave knowing how asleep we've been."—Nick Flynn
Of all the meanings of exposed I think my favorite
is the raw nerve shivering bug-like in the lamp light
while the surgeon arranges his dainty knives.
You can get close to that. You can brush
its wriggling limb and hear the scream.
You can lie there on the table, say,
"little nerve oh nerve it'll
be all right; there
there, there there.
October 15, 2014
For my father, reads the dedication to this winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry, and it is to fathers that Bishop returns again and again in poems that continually circle back to ideas of fathers and sons, illness and grief, and, ultimately, mortality. From the prologue poem on living, Terms of Service ( The signed agrees to breath, to the lungs' soggy bellows ), Bishop takes the reader on the journey of what it means to live while dying. Repetition is Bishop's linchpin as he takes us on visits to his father, who is sometimes dead, sometimes dying in a hospital, while we are guided through many moments by the biblical Adam and Cain. Several of the poems on grief and depression are addressed to Secret Fellow Sufferers, and Bishop, in starts and bursts, actively tries to move his reader from a place of darkness to a place of betterment: Feel at last, he concludes, what I / am feeling for you right now, / secret reader. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)