We live on the edge ofA raft through dejectionA joy almost too greatTo speak, so it takesBreath, so we breakAt the end of the lineWhenever we see the sun go onThe entire Death Valley coveredIn a carpet of yellow and goldpinafores. And you can’t imagine the hillsAny more than denyThe contours the failingLight that gives every angleA vision as it goes
Elegy (Deserted)
Eryn Green
Hope: the following page. Do not close the book.
I have turned all the pages of the book without finding hope.
Perhaps hope is the book.
—Edmond Jabés
Feature Date
- January 18, 2020
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Copyright © 2019 by Eryn Green
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Eryn Green’s first book, Eruv, was selected by Carl Phillips as the winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, and was published by Yale University Press in 2014. His second book, Beit, was selected as the 2019 Editor’s Choice at New Issues Press, and will be released in April 2020. Eryn’s poetry, criticism, and non-fiction has been featured in The New York Times, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Interim, Conduit, Painted Bride Quarterly, jubilat, and elsewhere. Currently as Assistant Professor in the English Department at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where he teaches Creative Writing, Mythology, and coordinates the World Literature Program, Eryn lives near the Red Rock Canyon Conservation area with his wife and daughter.
# 29
Saint Paul, Minnesota
Editor in Chief
William D. Waltz
Deputy Editor
Brett Astor
Assistant Editor
Kyle Constalie
Associate Editors
Steven Lee Beeber
William Stobb
Paula Cisewski
Conduit is a biannual literary journal that is at once direct, playful, inventive, irreverent, and darkly beautiful. Despite common sense and the laws of economics, Conduit has been thwarting good taste, progress, and consensus for over twenty years. Conduit publishes distinctive voices of literary merit—experimental to accessible, established to emerging—in snazzy volumes, featuring work that demonstrates originality, intelligence, courage, and humanity. Conduit champions a fresh mix of writers. If that isn’t enough, Conduit reaches beyond the literary by interviewing astronomers, ethno-botanists, artists, graphic artists, and historians, et cetera, believing a vigorous imagination is one that is cross-pollinated by diverse areas of human inquiry.
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