Textbook Illustrations of the Human Body by George Estreich
Praise for Textbook Illustrations of the Human Body:
"This is the best first book I've read in years, full of distinctive and powerful poems. George Estreich writes a vividly layered poetry, never settling for the easy touch: there's plenty of lyric pleasure to be had here, but there's always a meditative dimension that goes beyond mere surface
dazzle. These poems are field guides to our present world in all its darkly radiant detail, to cell and self and "the fine print of the stars"; they are also elegies for absent or lost worlds, exacting attempts to find "the right word" to deal with our grief. George Estreich is an engaging, alert,
intelligent, playful, and exhilarating poet, and his Textbook Illustrations
of the Human Body is a superb debut."
Michael McFee
"These are poems of alertness, heightened vividness, telling a story of
sustained witness and memory. George Estreich's brave new voice has a wonderful exactness of testimony, of life between two or more worlds, between vast stellar distances and microscopic minutiae. His lines can be tough as surgical steel, and bite with Swiftian wit, or move us with elegy and carol, finding out new codes and thresholds. Here is an exciting and authoritative poet."
Robert Morgan
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George Estreich received his M.F.A. from Cornell University, where he was awarded the
Sage Graduate Fellowship. His poems have appeared in a chapbook, "Elegy for Dan Rabinowitz," and in many journals, including Talking River Review, Atlanta Review and Passages North. In 2002, he won an Oregon Literary Fellowship and a residency at Caldera. He lives in Corvallis, Oregon, with his wife, Theresa Filtz, and two daughters, Ellie and Laura.
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excerpts
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Handplane
It's only a mirror. It divides.
It says: there is waste, a pile of shavings;
here is a pattern, a revealed surface,
a deepened opacity.
You could do this
all day, just for the motion, the mindless,
watchful rocking: the buried knots and voids
unblurring slowly, like rocks from an ebbing tide,
the lines trailing and eddying
their long skeins, and the surface changing,
with each stroke, with each dry wave curling upwards,
in the way it answers the light's question,
in the way it rephrases the light's question
as a kind of answer.
The right word
is an edge, a near-perfect angle,
its metal polished to mirror the world
it pares into translucence. Say it aloud,
the unwritten word, the word honed on silence,
whose edge lifts the dry wave of an image
from the day's ocean, whose edge lifts you
from yourself in dry waves of revision.
The handplane whispers it, over and over.
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The Manta Ray
How easily we navigate
through sleep: the day's
deluge of air accepted
without effort or question:
how gracefully we step over
the mild threshold, step
across it forever
without ever crossing:
how soon we see flailing thought
reduced to a glove sinking: how calmly we breathe,
our lungs like underwater wings,
gliding us forward into the dark: how easily
we move, as when climbing a tree you forget
the ground, watching
your hands ascend,
watching them pull you after.
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