Primer

By T.C. Boyle

In his third poetry collection, Primer, Aaron Smith grapples with the ugly realities of the private self, in which desire feels more like a trap than fulfillment. What is the face we prepare in our public lives to distract others from our private grief?

Smith's poetry explores that inexplicable tension between what we say and how we actually feel, exposing the complications of intimacy and the limitations of language to bridge those distances between friends, family members, and lovers. What we deny, in the end, may be just what we actually survive.

Mortality in Smith's work remains the uncomfortable foundation at the center of our relationship with others, to faith, to art, to love as we grow older, and ultimately, to our own sense of who we are in our bodies in the world.

The struggle of this book, finally, is in naming whether just what we say we want is enough to satisfy our primal needs, or are the choices we make to stay alive the same choices we make to help us, in so many small ways, to die.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Release date: Oct 6, 2016
• ISBN: 9780822982302

T.C. Boyle

T.C. Boyle is an American novelist and short-story writer. Since the mid-1970s, he has published eighteen novels and twelve collections of short stories. He won the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1988 for his third novel, World’s End, and the Prix Médicis étranger (France) in 1995 for The Tortilla Curtain. His novel Drop City was a finalist for the 2003 National Book Award. Most recently, he has been the recipient of the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award, the Henry David Thoreau Prize, and the Jonathan Swift Prize for satire. He is a Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus at the University of Southern California and lives in Santa Barbara.

Book preview

Pitt Poetry Series

Ed Ochester, Editor

PRIMER

AARON SMITH

University of Pittsburgh Press

Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pa., 15260

Copyright © 2016, Aaron Smith

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Printed on acid-free paper

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

ISBN 13: 978-0-8229-6434-6

ISBN 10: 0-8229-6434-1

Cover art: Elly Smallwood, Untitled – Mike, 2014

Cover design by Melissa Dias-Mandoly

ISBN 13: 978-0-8229-8230-2 (electronic)

for my sister, Belinda, the bravest person I know

and

for Manuel Muñoz, who listens and listens and listens

                                         You can’t walk through

the thinghood empty-handed, shirking the knives

of fact.

—Reginald Shepherd

CONTENTS

Ruined

Still Life with Gun

Notes for a Lecture: Keith Haring

Homosexuality

Ars Poetica

A Letter Regarding Your Recent Artwork

Liquid

Poem for Straight Guys

Like Him

Not All Faggots Bump Themselves off at the End of the Story

Middle School Summer

Blue Exits

Bleached

The Worried Well

College Summer

The Julianne Moore Collection

Jack White Gives Contract Advice to the Poet

Nothing

Takeout

New York Pretending to Be Paris

Born Again

Dirty

Still Life with Train

Boston: Late Summer

Shoot

This Exact Sky

This Unknown Buried in the Known

The River Phoenix Collection

X

When You Told Me Your Father Was Dying

Still Life with Antidepressants

Jennifer Lawrence

Still Life with a Hundred Crucifixions

Homosexuality

Evangelical

Lessons

David Beckham Is People Magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive

Primer for Men

Each Light a Knife

The Bar Closes But You Don’t Want to Go Home

Driving North on Interstate 99 the Poet Considers His Life at Forty

Notes

Acknowledgments

RUINED

1.

I’d never been in a fight, but I knew

I could take him. I punched Kenny Roth

on the playground. My fist smashed the bone

in his nose. A week before he’d stayed at my house,

tried to kiss me, touch my underwear. I wanted more

like he did, but didn’t know what that would mean about me.

He said he was only joking. He said he wouldn’t tell.

Still I slugged him, tried to break his jaw

in front of his girlfriend. It had something to do with sin,

or the honor of men, which usually means it’s about violence.

I liked the way his lip opened under my fist.

I liked what it felt like to be a man.

2.

I know a guy who likes