It gets all over like dog hair, the sunand it smells like Marlboro Lights in this port-a-pottya baseless waft, a mountain of sand; your restless shapecupped by all the places a grain finds to restthe high haze, the urging winds whistle in a Silver Bullet cana certain graininess to the photo plus a little humanall the places it finds to fit into, some lifereturns on the dust of a stranger
Feature Date
- April 22, 2024
Series
- What Sparks Poetry
Selected By
Share This Poem
Print This Poem
Excerpt from SO TOUGH: by Jared Stanley.
Published by Saturnalia Books on March 15, 2024.
English Copyright © 2023 by Jared Stanley.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Jared Stanley is a poet and writer who often collaborates with visual artists. He is the author of four collections of poetry, So Tough, EARS, The Weeds, and Book Made of Forest, as well as many chapbooks and pamphlets, most recently The Blurry Hole (with Sameer Farooq, Artspeak, 2022), and SHALL, (Black Rock Press, 2019). His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Bennington Review, Harvard Review, VOLT, Folder Magazine, and many others. He teaches at the University of Nevada, Reno and lives in Reno, Nevada with an historian and their daughter.
Winner of the Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize.
So Tough cuts a loose and spaced-out path through the interpenetrated dreams of public, doomsday time and private, organic time. Written in a season of wildfire smoke punctuated by gunfire, grieving, and a child’s questioning spirit, the book moves to the countervailing rhythms of household, eros, pleasure and charm, casting a wayward grin at the catastrophic comedy of our days. Though he’s not really that tough, Jared Stanley rides elemental tones through “the desert roses, semi-wilted, wonderful, yellowed, well, you know / suffering to cover the suffering.”
Poetry Daily Depends on You
With your support, we make reading the best contemporary poetry a treasured daily experience. Consider a contribution today.
