After the shrimp festival under bug glowlittle moving pieces of light in the palelight halos responding to my motionthrew rotisserie chicken bones into thewoods that night. The quarter hour alone Iread from the Bible on my phone and thoughtis this about me? I went listening, letwords between myself and one who is nolonger in or has not yet entered this worldbe few as pure strategy. I was so desperatefor information from outsidethe event, like the dark outside the windowsbut from outside it was the house that was dark.In comparing myself to others there was a slippage,from other bodies to somewhere betweenmyself and works of art, first a documentaryabout a very rare type of mirage. Iwas nothing like the mirage and nothinglike the way the men talked about it,a kind of respectful wonder I doubted I had ever felt.Then there were the poems I was nothing like.Kyle reached out having read Ecclesiastesto his father. I remember you lovedthere is a time for casting stones away and a timefor gathering stones together.From the rectangle of blue light I read all is vanityall is vanity and a striving after wind and I didlove that but at 90 degrees, sweatingin the middle of the night, my nearly euphoricfear, how much I didn’t know I didn’t know,that one day I would turn around and seelined up all the things I had done in order to surviveand think what’s amazing is not what you did,not that you did it when you were a little childbut that you did all these sad strange things for me.
2008
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- March 23, 2024
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“2008” from I LOVE INFORMATION: by Courtney Bush.
Published by Milkweed Editions on August 22, 2023.
Copyright © 2023 by Courtney Bush.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Courtney Bush is a poet and filmmaker from the Mississippi Gulf Coast who lives and works in New York City. Her second poetry collection, I Love Information (Milkweed Editions, 2023), was a winner of the 2022 National Poetry Series. She is also author of the poetry collection Every Book Is About The Same Thing (Newest York Arts Press, 2022), the chapbooks Isn’t This Nice? (blush lit, 2019) and Thirteen Morisettes (SPAM zine & press, 2024), written in collaboration with Jack Underwood, and the lyric newsletter The Courtney Report. She has recently completed a lo-fi feature length film adaptation of her first poetry collection, Every Book Is About The Same Thing: The Movie.
“A paradise of non sequiturs, I Love Information might contain ‘poems forked as a devil road,’ but each one proves a jump cut’s the quickest way to a ‘kind of heaven of facts without context, clean sources of light.’ A seeker who settles for nothing less than maximum amplitude, Courtney Bush heads ever toward ‘things so mysterious we shouldn’t bother with explaining,’ her poems a means to ‘entering sacred time recklessly,’ now with the gusto and bumptious charm of Christopher Smart, now with the sibylline intelligence of Rilke, and always with the antic candor of a digital native. Information at root means to give form to, and I too love the way these exciting, excitable poems give new form to the world I think I know by revealing the plurality of worlds quickly spinning within it.”
— Brian Teare
“‘I do not want to be crazy / about the circle whose center is everywhere.’ So begins Courtney Bush’s I Love Information, a book of revelation—and of risk. Here is a poet who has entered the crucible of madness in her pursuit of ‘some internal logic strong enough to believe in’ and come back to tell us about the songs the angels sing in ‘the space between everything.’ Touching down in preschool classrooms in which the poet has taught, the Mississippi Gulf Coast of her childhood, and intimate vignettes of love and friendship along the way, these oracular, incantatory poems prove the world worthy of the quest.”
— Jameson Fitzpatrick
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