Through his eyes I see in the dark. I see through change the static.Night says to day, You do you, then emerges bright as a peacock,its black drapery embroidery smiley faces looking vaguely smashed.Day had a state-of-the-art screen accentuate each pixelated daisy.You could kill the backlit spectacle and use it as a mirror of the starsor take the comfort on its merits. Tomorrow will be worse, it cooed.Dave put a feeding tube up where the sun don’t shine, the moongoing, Did you have to? Did you? then smiling to show it didn’t mind.Louis had the breakthrough moment on what looked to be a pizza slice:It’s the cover of your book, he said— Dad, it’s the cover of your pizza book—
Bloom
Mural, David Teng Olsen, 2017
Feature Date
- December 11, 2020
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Excerpt from THE MATH CAMPERS by Dan Chiasson.
Copyright © 2020 by Dan Chiasson.
Excerpted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC, New York.
All rights reserved.
No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Dan Chiasson is the author of four previous collections of poetry, most recently Bicentennial, and a book of criticism, One Kind of Everything: Poem and Person in Contemporary America. He is the poetry critic for The New Yorker. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Whiting Writers Award, Chiasson is the Lorraine C. Wang Professor of English at Wellesley College, and lives in Massachussetts.
“Whether he’s writing about art or parenthood, Chiasson pirouettes between the sublime and the comic.”
—Anthony Domestico, Commonweal
“Meditative . . . Invites the reader to witness the poet’s processes of creation, retrieval, and revision as a writer and dreamer, father and son . . . These beautifully crafted poems are a memorable addition to Chiasson’s singular oeuvre.”
—Publishers Weekly
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