First we installed a tall white cabinet and filled it with books, records, a cracked vase we found in Crete. You said you liked things the way I did. So did I. Quickly we added a table, chairs, lamps, then a desk, until we had no more room for a sofa, but I supposed we weren’t sofa people anyway. You agreed. I took your hand as we stood on the curb and watched the sky turn from blue to black. In that certain light I can see again all the base configurations we attempted as we tried to think our way out of this and then that, one light bulb burning out after another until it was noon again. Neither of us knew what to do, so we sold the cabinet and bought a sofa. It’s been months now and still the books lie open on the wooden floor, the pages sailing out like moths in the dark.
Arrangements
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- March 22, 2024
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“Arrangements” from ORGANS OF LITTLE IMPORTANCE by Adrienne Chung, Copyright ©2023 by Adrienne Chung. Used by permission of Penguin Books, an imprint of Penguin PublishingGroup, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
Adrienne Chung is the author of Organs of Little Importance (Penguin 2023), a winner of the National Poetry Series. Her work has been published in The Yale Review, Joyland, Diagram, and elsewhere. A recipient of grants and fellowships from MacDowell, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, she holds a BA from Stanford University and an MFA from UW-Madison. She teaches at the Berlin Writers’ Workshop and is a poetry editor at Sand Journal.
New York, New York
Penguin Random House LLC
“Mind detritus becomes the stuff of great art in the hands of poet Adrienne Chung . . . a poet in complete command of her craft.”
—NPR.org
“Organs of Little Importance is a riotous feat . . . Ferocious. Funny. Deeply intelligent. Adrienne Chung leaves a charred wake.”
—Solmaz Sharif, author of Customs and Look
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