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    Disorder
    Disorder
    Disorder
    Ebook79 pages23 minutes

    Disorder

    By Vanesha Pravin

    ()

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    About this ebook

    Midsummer

    Cambridge, MA, 2008
     
    Midsummer. Finally, you are used to disappointment.
    A baby touches phlox. Many failures, many botched attempts,
     
    A little success in unexpected forms. This is how the rest will go:
    The gravel raked, bricks ashen, bees fattened–honey not for babes.
     
    All at once, a rustling, whole trees in shudder, clouds pulled
    Westward. You are neither here nor there, neither right nor
     
    Wrong. The world is indifferent, tired of your insistence.
    Garter snakes swallow frogs. The earthworms coil.
     
    On your fingers, the residue of red pistils. What have you made?
    What have you kept alive? Green, a secret, occult,
     
    Grass veining the hands. Someone’s baby toddling.
    And the phlox white. For now. Midsummer.

    A remarkable first book, Disorder tells the story, by turns poignant and outrageous, of a family’s dislocation over four continents during the course of a hundred years. In short lyrics and longer narrative poems, Vanesha Pravin takes readers on a kaleidoscopic trek, from Bombay to Uganda, from England to Massachusetts and North Carolina, tracing the path of familial love, obsession, and the passage of time as filtered through the perceptions of family members and a host of supporting characters, including ubiquitous paparazzi, amorous vicars, and a dubious polygamist. We experience throughout a speaker forged by a deep awareness of intergenerational, multicontinental consciousness. At once global and personal, crossing ethnic, linguistic, and national boundaries in ways that few books of poetry do, Disorder bristles with quiet authority backed by a skeptical intelligence.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press
    Release dateOct 9, 2015
    ISBN9780226235530
    Disorder

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      Book preview

      Disorder - Vanesha Pravin

      Disorder

      Disorder

      Vanesha Pravin

      The University of Chicago Press

      Chicago & London

      VANESHA PRAVIN teaches at the University of California, Merced.

      The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

      The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

      © 2015 by The University of Chicago

      All rights reserved. Published 2015.

      Printed in the United States of America

      24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 1 2 3 4 5

      ISBN-13: 978-0-226-23536-3 (paper)

      ISBN-13: 978-0-226-23553-0 (e-book)

      DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226235530.001.0001

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Pravin, Vanesha, author.

      Disorder / Vanesha Pravin.

      pages ; cm. — (Phoenix poets)

      ISBN 978-0-226-23536-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-226-23536-x (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-226-23553-0 (e-book)

      I. Title. II. Series: Phoenix Poets.

      PS3616.R388D57 2015

      811'.6—dc23

      2014041295

      ♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

      for my mother, HEMLATA, and my father, PRAVIN

      Contents

      Acknowledgments

      I

      The Pharmacist’s House

      First Wife

      Midsummer

      Second Wife

      Agapanthus Is The Word

      The Arrangement

      The Ninth Floor

      Morgendämmerung

      Innocence

      Mystery

      Courtship, 1944

      The Conquest of Happiness

      Green

      The Third Gender

      Sweet Milk

      Sleep, Wake, Sleep

      Buffalo Milk

      Late Afternoon

      Hemma Remembers Two Cities

      Hemma Remembers Disorder

      Hemma Remembers Sickness

      Bootcamp Vipassana

      The End of Summer

      II

      Rivers

      Birmingham, UK 1969

      Night with the Vicar

      Courtship, 1971

      The Ninth Month

      In the Garden

      Sunday

      Funeral

      The Polygamist’s Buttons

      Hoo

      Dictionary

      The Library Sale

      Kamla

      Marriage

      Sleeping in the Walmart Lot, 1996

      Pomegranate

      Rain

      CVS Pharmacy

      Time

      ’79 BMW Stalls Again

      City Aubade

      III

      Boll Weevil & the Make or Break

      Belief Revision

      Night

      Appendix: Family Tree

      Acknowledgments

      Grateful acknowledgment is made to the editors of the following journals, in which some of the poems first appeared, some in different forms:

      Callaloo: Hemma Remembers Disorder (under the title Disorder) and Hemma Remembers Two Cities (under the title Two Cities)

      Crab Orchard Review:

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