Escape Velocity
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From the moment of a marriage’s heated inception to its period of luminous crowding and onward into distance and darkness, Bonnie Arning’s Escape Velocity asks if it’s possible to exist outside the only universe we’ve ever known. In modes both lyric and narrative, we are given a peephole into the height and decline of a marriage that begins beneath the moving lights of Las Vegas, Nevada, and traverses the devastating terrain of gambling, miscarriage, infidelity, and violence.
Arning gives voice to divergent aspects of love and violence through her use of math problems, erasures, dictionary entries, structured stanzas, and sprawling free verse. This multiplicity of forms comes together to explore everything from pop culture references of domestic violence to cultural notions of victims and victimhood. However dark, collectively these poems tell a love story—an acceptance of our capability to love those who hurt us, but also the love-of-self required to slowly and steadily reach "the velocity to be everleaving."
In the tradition of Eavan Boland and Louise Glück, Arning wrestles down and examines the terrible without flinching. We journey with her, engrossed by each difficult truth: a precipice near which we are both terrified to stand and transfixed by its unnerving insistence on beauty.
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Escape Velocity - Bonnie Arning
The Mountain West Poetry Series
Stephanie G’Schwind & Donald Revell, series editors
We Are Starved, by Joshua Kryah
The City She Was, by Carmen Giménez Smith
Upper Level Disturbances, by Kevin Goodan
The Two Standards, by Heather Winterer
Blue Heron, by Elizabeth Robinson
Hungry Moon, by Henrietta Goodman
The Logan Notebooks, by Rebecca Lindenberg
Songs, by Derek Henderson
The Verging Cities, by Natalie Scenters-Zapico
A Lamp Brighter than Foxfire, by Andrew S. Nicholson
House of Sugar, House of Stone, by Emily Pérez
&luckier, by Christopher J Johnson
Escape Velocity, by Bonnie Arning
ESCAPE VELOCITY
POEMS
BONNIE ARNING
The Center for Literary Publishing
Colorado State University
Copyright © 2017 by Bonnie Arning
All rights reserved.
For information about permission to reproduce
selections from this book, write to
The Center for Literary Publishing
attn: Permissions
9105 Campus Delivery, Colorado State University
Fort Collins, Colorado 80523-9105.
Printed in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Arning, Bonnie, author.
Title: Escape velocity : poems / Bonnie Arning.
Other titles: Mountain west poetry series.
Description: Fort Collins, Colorado : The Center for Literary Publishing, Colorado State University, [2017] | Series: The mountain west poetry series
Identifiers: LCCN 2016050021 (print) | LCCN 2016051382 (ebook) | ISBN 9781885635556 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781885635563 (electronic)
Subjects: LCSH: Marriage--Poetry.
Classification: LCC PS3601.R5824 A6 2017 (print) | LCC PS3601.R5824 (ebook) |
DDC 811/.6--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016050021
The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.
1 2 3 4 5 21 20 19 18 17
Arlo,
More than the universe,
which though unbounded
is finite, infinity is not
a quantity. Infinity is
all there is: I love you
like that.
How easy to ignore the shifting of stars
when the self seems its own astronomical body.
CONTENTS
I.
Marriage Ephemera
The night Saddam Hussein died we were drunk
Las Vegas Strip, 4 a.m.
On all the nights he leaves me, a spider crawls into my head,
Escape Fallacy
Stand Burn
Tight Spaces
Clark County Reveal
Pearl
II.
Lost Body
While paying for lunch I found his wedding ring
The Fish
First Summer
Knit Tight
The Science of Sight
Model Victim
Calculus of Violent Behavior
Taking the Moon, Burning It Down
III.
Siren Song
Bleeding, Love
Victim Mentality
Five