My daughter is in the kitchen, working out death.She wants to get it: how it tastes and feels.Her teacher talks like it’s some glittery gold sticker.Her classmates hear rumors, launch it as a cursewhen toys aren’t shared. Between bites of cantaloupe,she considers what she knows: her friend’s grandpa lives onlyin her iPad. Dr. Seuss passed, but keeps speakingin rhyme. We go to Queens Zoo and spot the beakish skullof a white-tailed deer tucked between rocksin the puma’s enclosure. It’s just for show, I explain,explaining nothing. That night and the one after,my daughter dreams of bones—how they liftout of her skin and try on dresses. So silly! she laughs,when I ask if she’s okay. Then toward the back-endof summer, we head to Coney Island to catcha Cyclones game. We buy popcorn and fries. A pop fly arcsover checkerboard grass when past the warning track,the park wall, she sees a giant wooden spine,this brownish-red maze traced in decay. She calls itSad Rollercoaster, then begs to be taken home.
Sad Rollercoaster
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- May 31, 2024
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“Sad Rollercoaster” from LET OUR BODIES CHANGE THE SUBJECT: by Jared Harél.
Published by University of Nebraska Press in September 1, 2023.
Copyright © 2023 by Jared Harél.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Jared Harél is the author, most recently, of Let Our Bodies Change the Subject (U. of Nebraska Press, 2023) which was selected by Kwame Dawes as the Winner of the Prairie Schooner Raz/Shumaker Book Prize in Poetry and has been named a Finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize and the National Jewish Book Award. He’s been awarded the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from American Poetry Review as well as the William Matthews Prize from Asheville Poetry Review. Jared teaches writing, plays drums, and lives with his family in Westchester, NY. For more information, visit: jaredharel.com
Lincoln, Nebraska
University of Nebraska
"For readers who are parents, they will find fellow feeling. For readers who are not parents (like myself) but have always found their own parents to be mysterious, this book provides a lucid possibility of what we might have known, had we opportunity. Harél offers the most generous version, of a father who labors to comfort his children without betraying his integrity."
—Esther Lin, Cortland Review
"These poems speak to us because Harél's angst is relatable and real and cannot be wished away or dismissed with rational explanations or neat poetic pronouncements. If we choose to journey with him, we can keep exploring the questions together and benefit from his companionship as we continue to explore the enigma of what it means to be human. There is joy and truth in that."
—Karen Corinne Herceg, diode poetry
“This life, Jared Harél says, is a sad rollercoaster, all of us with our arms up, screaming on the way down. Thwarted desires, the many losses, school shootings, bomb museums, plague, all seen through the eyes of parents and children. Even so, there are ‘sorbet-colored koi’ in a pond, a daughter singing, a father donating blood to the Red Cross, sea stars, morning prayers before work with Tefillin in sweatpants and socks. This book was written with, what Czeslaw Milosz is quoted as saying, ‘compassion for others entangled in the flesh.’”
—Dorianne Laux, author of Only As the Day Is Long: New and Selected Poems
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