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Note to the Reader
Copper Canyon Press encourages you to calibrate your settings by using the line of characters below, which optimizes the line length and character size:
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When this text appears on one line on your device, the resulting settings will most accurately reproduce the layout of the text on the page and the line length intended by the author. Viewing the title at a higher than optimal text size or on a device too small to accommodate the lines in the text will cause the reading experience to be altered considerably; single lines of some poems will be displayed as multiple lines of text. If this occurs, the turn of the line will be marked with a shallow indent.
Thank you. We hope you enjoy these poems.
This e-book edition was created through a special grant provided by the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation. Copper Canyon Press would like to thank Constellation Digital Services for their partnership in making this e-book possible.
How many people will be sleeping in the old houses
the night when my hair lets out tongues of its fire
and burns everything to the ground?
—Diane Wakoski
Contents
2 a brief biography of the poet’s mother
3 maybe this will explain my taste in men
4 poem written with sawed-off typewriter
7 leverage
8 letter from my heart to my brain
9 letter from my brain to my heart
10 ghost town
2 heretic
4 outhouse
6 the ghost’s daughter speaks: white elephant
7 weight
9 kin
11 * * *
3 singe
4 sermon
5 una oración (bruja’s solioquy)
6 swell
7 fairy-tale pantoum for my seven-year-old self
8 salvage
10 glutton
1 my eyes in the time of apparition
2 dead
