Ira Sadoff is the author of eight collections of poetry, most recently True Faith (BOA Editions, 2012), Barter (University of Illinois Press, 2007), and Grazing (University of Illinois Press, 1998). He has published a novel, Uncoupling (Houghton Mifflin, 1982), and a collection of poems, stories and essays: The Ira Sadoff Reader. A book of literary criticism, History Matters: Contemporary Poetry on the Margins of American […]
The skull, when it’s not whistling like a kettle, is stocking up on unshelved tremors: We can only unfold the map and search out A Storm Is Coming. Before that there’s shouting OhLaLa in the convertible, scratchy music. I too liked the volume turned up. Her eyes closed, taking in being taken care of: a […]
When the Lord God went belly-up, out of business, little brats went shin-kicking through the streets of Lapaloma. The Watchmaker closed up shop to peel wallpaper off the Vatican. Neitzsche was in my dream too, in a tedious spat with Anna Mahler: the syphilis was invisible, so he thought, these are my thoughts. Sunny, a […]
I can’t just be tracking the lapses, those marginals about to leap from the ledge, falling leaves as symptoms, those late at night knifepoint takeovers – leaving out the feathery transient random pedestrian melodies, some centuries old, whole symphonies that still stir that stew of fantasy and biology, somewhere inside the calliope we call a […]
When I came back, he was gone. My mother was in the bathroom crying, my sister in her crib restless but asleep. The sun was shining in the bay window, the grass had not been cut. No one mentioned the other woman, nights he spent in that stranger’s house. I sat at my desk and […]
For instance, the shallow river was bronze, fish were breathing along the bank, swelling and deflating, but I don’t remember the green things — if they were natural/unnatural. In the right light you could see through them, the scaly creatures we came from, the way you could almost see through the statue of David. You […]
I suspect it’s the Dias Irae that gets me going, shaking a fist at the gathering storm clouds I use as a symbol of The sky’s a rotten apricot in my pocket. Just because the Gods made us weave through traffic, my fellow countrymen think it’s fine to turn the oak into a parking lot, […]
Once I could say my loyal friend, the house wren. I might even sing to him. Did I not hear the beatific, the breathlessness – a patter shaking the tamarind pod, the bright green feathery foliage stammered by a breeze? Those muttering implosions, did nothing intend them? Is the harp, too, obsolete? When the wren […]