I am tired of having a name.Every time I wakeit grinds its teethlike the gears of a moving van,and it smells of soot,like the sweat of being a man,and it weighs like a stoneI carry for no one’s sake.In the courthouse it echoesdown the long corridors,and it creaks in the bedspringsof cheap rooms, and it croons in bars;it whistles up to the gapsbetween the starsand down to the truck stopbathroom’s piss-stained floors.I have betrayed it to the darkwhen there was no one to blameand whispered it seductivelyinto the ear of danger.But I am tired, and I wantto be done with it for good.I will give it up. I will answerto nothing. I will bea stranger. I will put on the silencelike an executioner’s hood.Here it is, poor necksquirming on the block: my name.
Grievance
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- May 15, 2024
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“Grievance” from THE SENTENCE: by Morri Creech.
Published by Louisiana State University Press on September 13, 2023.
Copyright © 2023 by Morri Creech.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Morri Creech is the author of five collections of poetry, including The Sleep of Reason, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Blue Rooms, and The Sentence. A recipient of NEA and Ruth Lilly Fellowships, as well as North Carolina and Louisiana Artists Grants, he teaches at Queens University of Charlotte.
Baton Rouge, Louisiana
Louisiana State University
“Rich with sound and imagination, these masterful poems teach us to pay attention to not just the matter of our lives but the music of our lives.”
—Ada Limón
“All poets start out as artists, a blessed few eventually become craftspeople, too. Morri Creech is a craftsperson as well as an artist, and the poems in The Sentence are uncommonly well-made things.”
—Shane McCrae
“The Sentence is a book of reflections, refractions, raveling, and ramifications with breathtaking branchings of syntax, sonic permutations, and Frostian forks foreclosing other lives.”
—Dora Malech
“Somehow, remarkably, this collection seems both more impersonal and more personal than Creech’s earlier work, more wide-ranging in its expression of common experience yet even more deeply felt, sentence by artful sentence.”
—Joseph Harrison
“The Sentence is Creech’s best book to date, its feats of imagination his most sweeping and its reckonings his most clear-eyed.”
—David Yezzi
“For Creech’s The Sentence, I’d use the word ‘stunning.’ Creech’s control and craft is superb. His use of rhyme, magnificent. Nobody writes formal poetry as well as this. Nobody. I’m lulled and emblazoned at the same time. I love this book. I LOVE this book.”
—South Florida Poetry Journal
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