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Unpredictable, wry, always provocative, displaying a sure and startling command of images and ideas, Nance Van Winckel's poems make every gesture of language count

Table of Contents

I / Doorman

Slate

Waking, Working

Mister

We Called Goodgye, but She Was Already Gone

Agape

Black Stitches, Black Knots

Doorman

The New Boys Will Never Love You

In the New Boy's In-Basket

All Asides Aside

White Marginalia

Errata

RE: The Two New Boys

The Rattled Hymn of the Republic

II / Middle, Nowhere

Before There Was a Road (On the Way to Wilburville)

Middle, Nowhere

Seme and Semaphore

I Am on a Break

Retrograde: Echoes from Earlier Chapters

Passing Through the Shadows of Great Buildings

The Usual

When the Van Broke Down

III /Threshold

Reentry

White Brides, White Mistresses

Almost an End of Absinthe

Verlaine in Prison

Simone Weil at the Renault Factory (1935)

At Some Point the River Always Veers Away from the Road

The Winter Cow

Eurydice

Our Ladies of Elsewhere

You People

IV / We Fall in Behind

We Fall in Behind

Fuck It

Notes

Upriver: Distinctions of Never and Ever

The Ones You Love Are Cold

Let Me Remind You You Are Still Under Oath

I Talk to the Bread, I Chat with the Dough

Breaking Only Little Laws

Indiscriminate Kisses

Leastways

Adieu

Hand-Embroidered Mourning Piece for Clara Elisabeth Kriebel, 1779

Bid Me Be the Bird

Acknowledgments

About the Poet

About the Author

Nance Van Winckel teaches in the graduate creative writing programs at Eastern Washington University and Vermont College. She is the author of four books of poetry and three collections of short stories. Her numerous awards include two National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowships, a Pushcart Prize, two Washington State Artist Trust Awards, and Poetry Magazine's Friends of Literature Award. After a Spell won the Washington State Governor's Award for Poetry.SlateMy too-sharp lefts kept making the bundle in backsluice right. I was driving with the dead Nancein the truck bed. The gas gauge didn't workso there was an added worry of runningout of juice. Her word. Her word onewindy evening with the carpetsstripped from a floor, whichsurprised us as stone - slatefrom the quarry we wereheaded to now, but Let's first have ussome juice, she'd said, then, barefoot on bare slate.The truck-bedded Nance, wrapped in her winding sheet,thuds left, clunks right. I'm sorry about my driving,sorry about the million lovely pine moths mottledon my windshield. Thank God, here's the quarry,and there's the high ledge, where, as a girl longago, she'd stepped bravely from the whitetowel and stared down. Then she'd held her noseand leapt out into it - this same cool and radiant air.

Reviews

"No Starling touches upon spiritual and political issues alike, signing aloud in a crystal clear voices that deserves to be heard."
*Midwest Book Review*