Love Song with Motor Vehicles

In Love Song with Motor Vehicles, Alan Michael Parker marshals a penetrating wit and sharp irony that mirrors that of Charles Simic and John Berryman. Parker's robust imagination explores the music in places poetry doesn't usually travel -- "Driving Past My Exit," "The Screened Porch," "Salmon Seen from Above," "On the Red-Eye." His poems find their epiphanies early on, and, most strikingly, do not close at their endings but, rather, open. The book includes a series titled "The Penates." These poems take as their subjects the household gods Aeneas brought with him from Troy to the founding of Rome. But the poems have a twist: the various gods -- of steel wool, draperies, brooms -- have been updated, dragged into our culture and time. The result is a post-modern riff upon present-day spirituality in relation to mythology. Parker's poem "The Cat," published in Love Song with Motor Vehicles, won the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. "Love Song with Motor Vehicles is full of, among other things, gods. But what surprising gods they are, with their strange questions, sad visions, and circumscribed domains that never stay circumscribed. Like all of Parker's brilliant books, this one is serious fun, made of grace and intelligent good spirit." --Andrew Hudgins

Signed copies available in limited supply

Burn

What I remember is not what happened,
not the pain from the burn but later,
the baths five times a day.
Troy burned too, I would say from the tub

where I read. And the temple.
My cousin came and sat with me.
Who knew she was a girl?
Of course, this was before my parents

were people, when they were just parents.
Before Kant arrived. Keats.
Sometimes childhood seems like
a path at night, the flashlight beam

bouncing all over the trees.
Why must the past be a metaphor?
How redundant, when every word
is already something else.

There were soft cookies.
What terror I felt
I saved in a specimen jar
for later, for you, for now.

© BOA Editions, Ltd 2003

Available editions:
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Paperback ISBN: 1-929918-35-6
Price: $13.95
Publishing Date: April 2003