Curiosities, The

By Brittany Perham

Brittany Perham’s first collection, THE CURIOSITIES, fixes its sure and unsettling gaze on daughters and fathers, sisters and brothers, madness, sickness, longing and love. These poems make up a cabinet of curiosities because they hold what is fascinating or frightening, beautiful or awesome— a “stomach plumed by syringe,” a “zoo’s lost leopard,” a “forest of high-waisted trees”— up to the eye. In their image-making, the poems place language itself beneath the glass slide of a microscope in order to discern its component structures, its natural patterns. Curiosity here is a way of looking—unsatisfiable, looping back on itself, yielding only further questions. In these uncanny and passionate poems our own lives are made strange to us, and we are wonderstruck.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Parlor Press, LLC
• Release date: Nov 30, 2011
• ISBN: 9781602355378

Brittany Perham

Brittany Perham is a Jones Lecturer in Poetry at Stanford University, where she was a Wallace Stegner Fellow from 2009-2011. Her work may be found in the Bellevue Literary Review, Drunken Boat, Lo-Ball, Southern Poetry Review, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. She lives in San Francisco.

Book preview

1

Unit: broad waking

The hard season has left

an apricot tree in the window,

the smell of crushed leaves from the riverbank.

It takes so many words to say the sound of water—

a faltering, gated whisper,

the flush of a skirt in the hallway.

Always there will be a dream, always

a waking. Someone will come to stand in the doorway,

or darkness will come to stand in the doorway.

Think of everything in terms of absence:

no snow is falling, nothing held

in the high branches of the tree.

Fever

It comes fully formed, primal,

the smell of skinned pears.

It comes grease-limbed,

through the light-line around the door,

through the seam of the dress

the color of pears. It comes dinnerless

and able, loud in the hold of the throat.

The throat is the stem of the pear,

the sky in the absence of stars.

The throat is my father in his black suit,

come in from the cold. Oh bladeless heart,

who will brush away the snow?

Who will unglove his hands?

Ambulance

I speak as if my voice is a guidewire

sliding toward my brother’s heart,

opening each vessel’s glossy skin, lighting

the coal stove inside. Warmth might begin

rising upward, his cheeks coloring like twin flowers.

I narrate the roads we drive by memory:

The coastline north of the airport, I say,

the tunnel beneath the harbor, and the city’s summer

market, each storefront closed. If I could see

my mother, where she sits beside the driver,

I’d see how tears can look like sweat—

as though she’s been running

some long distance, her hair the wiry stems

of orchids in my father’s greenhouse.

When I was young, he lifted a caught sparrow

from the soil bed and set it in my hands.

It rolled to its side, clawless, injured

in the falling. Toss it up, my father said,

maybe it will