The End of Travel

By Julie Bruck

With crisp, elegant language, sharp wit and resonant images, Julie Bruck's new book gentles the largesse of life out of its many smallnesses. The way a straw buoys up in a can of pop, or a friend’s dress holds her shape, even on its hanger: Bruck textures her poetry with a life "you could close your hand around." Bruck's is the urban world so many of us walk through, eyes closed. But Bruck's eyes are wide open, keen and collecting. With teeth and heart, she cracks open the ordinary to reveal life’s love and loss, joy and fragility, its extraordinary fullness.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brick Books
• Release date: Sep 15, 1999
• ISBN: 9781771310482

Julie Bruck

Julie Bruck is the author of two previous books, The End of Travel (1999), and The Woman Downstairs (1993). Her recent work has appeared in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Maisonneuve, The Malahat Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review and The Walrus, among other publications. A Montreal native, she lives in San Francisco with her husband and daughter.

Book preview

The End of Travel

The End of Travel

Julie Bruck

Brick Books

CANADIAN CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION DATA

Bruck, Julie, 1957–

The end of travel

Poems.

I. Title.

PS8553.R8225E52  1999    C811′.54  C99-931969-8

PR9199.3.B78E52  1999

Copyright © Julie Bruck, 1999.

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts

for our publishing programme. The support of the Ontario Arts

Council is also gratefully acknowledged.

Cover image is courtesy Squarebooks,

from Spanning The Gate (hand-coloured by Ann Rhoney).

Author photo is by Nina Bruck.

Brick Books

www.brickbooks.ca

Box 20081

431 Boler Road

London, Ontario

N6K 4G6

Canada

[e-mail]

Contents

I. DIVIDING THE DARK

Sex Next Door

A Bus in Nova Scotia

Diagnosis

Firstborn

Adult Children

Raft

What We Talk About

II. KATE'S DRESS

Catastrophe

Cafeteria

Greene Ave.

Listening to Morphine

Kate's Dress

Small Mind

From the Third Storey

Back to the World

What They Take

Instructions to the Caretaker

III. THE STRANGE FAMILIAR

How the Bottom Feeders Got Language

About That Stockyard

Sylvie's Spiral Staircase

Kneel in the Air

Response to Michael's Change of Address

Enthusiasm

Drive

Summer/Estaté

Talking About Race

The Lucky Ones

Perceived Threat

What Did It

Notice to Cut Tree

IV. THE BOTTLE PICKER'S PROGRESS

Nancy

Open Reading

Remission

Waking Up the Neighbourhood

One Flight Down

In California

Confection

for

Paul McGoldrick

&

Phoebe Tallman

We'd rather have the iceberg than the ship,

although it meant the end of travel.

– Elizabeth Bishop

The Imaginary Iceberg

One minute there was road beneath us and the next just sky.

– Ani DiFranco

Out of Range

I.

Dividing the Dark

SEX NEXT DOOR

It's rare, slow as a creaking of oars,

and she is so frail and short of breath

on the street, the stairs – tiny, Lilliputian,

one wonders how they do it.

So, wakened by the shiftings of their bed nudging

our shared wall as a boat rubs its pilings,

I want it to continue, before her awful

hollow coughing fit begins. And when

they have to stop (always), until it passes, let

us praise that resumed rhythm, no more than a twitch

really, of our common floorboards.