Compositions
To be read
Final Soliloquy Of The Interior Decorator
On the counter, a bowl of oranges, a book called
Cooking in the Basque Country. He put Scriabin on the player
very low, opened the window so the gardenia
scent crept in. It was after all the heart of summer.
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The Haunting
I chased a spot of clear air.
Your eyes were every light in the house
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Wild Women
Can I act like an angel if I live like a jerk? Can I keep disguising my sensitivity with parties and verve?
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Love Poem for People Who Hate Themselves: Heaven and Hell
I’m forced to watch through the eyes of the animal that brought me here, the animal I’m trapped inside of, confused and untamable.
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Love Poem for People Who Hate Themselves: Reading Celan on Labor Day
Beneath the veil of this whitewashed, sun-fucked sky, it’s hard to see.
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The Caged Girl Wishes That The Man in the Volcano Was Free Like Her
…and we all know that people have been visiting
his body all day to wish that they’d get laid. Or that their fathers wouldn’t die.
Or that their ex-lovers would or would not get a blade to the eye.
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Physical Therapy—or—I’ll Stick With My
the year of the root canal & bodies
dropping from the sky,
I’ll keep my metonymic
guts under wraps
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The Basket
The three words
He wants from his lover
Are not I love you,
But Do it again.
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Ars Poetica
I’d like to Write
My name There
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Collocutions
To be overheard
Ambushed by Profundity
Stylistically, it’s an adventurous collection, ranging from short lyric to longer free verse meditations and elegies to bulky prose poems that tend toward narrative. Booth’s poems roam through childhood and adolescence, repeating characters and subjects from family life and the speakers’ hometowns. The general concern here is loss. The titles are interesting. There’s an epigraph from “East Coker.” Ok, go. continue reading
The Masculine Disposition
The book begins with the line, “a word falls because I ask of it”: so yes, it’s about language…which, well, we’ve all seen. Ahem. But I never felt ivory-towered or outside of the poem: it’s more intimate and raw, letting us piece together the world, continue reading
Some Words
from our editor
Ovenbird Poetry 