Quite Apart: Poems

By Krystal Languell

Quite Apart asks "what about after survival?" in a chronicle of attempts to have a heart in a rough world. Haunted by work and its wasted hours, the book offers a glimpse of self-rendered as subtext beneath the sheen of productivity. Inventive formal poems provide a kind of alibi, mirroring the inflexibility of the environment--driving through mountains, bleeding in alleys, losing keys in a bar parking lot--to allow some emotion to pass through, tenderness intact.

The action among forms of address moves across the sections from direct to readerly, to more distant, back to the last/lost sequence, and ultimately into an intimate direct address, which builds up a reserve of trust adequate to collapse the distance of a cool operator. Mediated by grammatical invention, the collection enacts the making of an authentic place and self, reckoning with difficult truths (failures, omissions) to arrive at a state of peace having weathered some storms. It returns to a core and singular perspective, a knowing eye, that captures absurdity and tragedy, the absurdity of tragedy, to find--beyond vigilance--a balance between acceptance and bucking, which is perhaps another name for love.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1629221422
• ISBN13: 9781629221427
• Release Date: April 2019
• Publisher: University of Akron Press
• Length: 88 Pages
• Weight: 0.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.9" x 8.8"