Free shipping on orders over $99
Spit Back a Boy

Spit Back a Boy

by Iain Haley Pollock
Paperback
Publication Date: 30/06/2011

Share This Book:

  $34.10
Iain Haley Pollock's poems cover the ground from a woman late to catfish supper to an ancient queen who howls, "Sea, you is ugly," from the creaking of slave ships launched from Lancaster to gunfire on a contemporary Philadelphia street. Such lyric moments find grounding in stories woven through this book-in one story line, a boy with a black mother and white father wishes he could shed his white skin or carve into what lies beneath: "I flung my almost white self / into my mother's embrace-that brown / embrace I hoped would swallow me whole / and spit back a boy four shades darker." Another thread follows a marriage and a woman intertwined with hunger and the blues, a woman who hears a whale song in a refrigerator's hum, who cries hard like the lonely barking of a fox.

Even when these poems soften, they can't be complacent about good fortune: for all the maple seedpods and snow fluttering down here, the poems are always aware of wreckage and car bombs there, and they keep conscious of the mustard gas of old wars and the losses of recent ones. Punctuated with lives that end early, such as those of Hart Crane and Mikey Clark, a high-school classmate who once swiped the Communion wine, Pollock's collection earns its vitality and romance without closing its eyes to violence and sorrow.
ISBN:
9780820339085
9780820339085
Category:
Poetry by individual poets
Format:
Paperback
Publication Date:
30-06-2011
Language:
English
Publisher:
University of Georgia Press
Country of origin:
United States
Pages:
72
Dimensions (mm):
216x140x7mm
Weight:
0.01kg

This title is in stock with our Australian supplier and should arrive at our Sydney warehouse within 1-2 weeks of you placing an order.

Once received into our warehouse we will despatch it to you with a Shipping Notification which includes online tracking.

Please check the estimated delivery times below for your region, for after your order is despatched from our warehouse:

ACT Metro 2 working days

NSW Metro 2 working days 

NSW Rural 2-3 working days

NSW Remote 2-5 working days

NT Metro 3-6 working days

NT Remote 4-10 working days

QLD Metro 2-4 working days

QLD Rural 2-5 working days

QLD Remote 2-7 working days

SA Metro 2-5 working days

SA Rural 3-6 working days

SA Remote 3-7 working days

TAS Metro 3-6 working days

TAS Rural 3-6 working days

VIC Metro 2-3 working days

VIC Rural 2-4 working days

VIC Remote 2-5 working days

WA Metro 3-6 working days

WA Rural 4-8 working days

WA Remote 4-12 working days

Reviews

Be the first to review Spit Back a Boy.