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In the Bee Latitudes, ’Annah Sobelman’s second book, traverses and choreographs the places of passion where visible and invisible touch. With extraordinary ability to imagine her way far into an experience, making new moves in the English language at each and every point, Sobelman enlists many voices, questions, and bodies (mostly in Taos and Florence) that press toward Emersonian nature. In vibrant, malleable, and layered syntax, these poems break conventions of lineation and punctuation, each utterance at the frontier of the articulate, yet necessarily pitched toward the insistently visceral.
Proem
Structure — Masolino ’ s Eve — The Female Snake
I
The Ghosts Are Different From the Love of Some Brains
In the Bee Latitudes
The Untitled
The Mess
Midnight Address from the President
Violence of Feathers
Ode to the Surfacing
If A Commandment
Dandelions for the Threnody
After Awhile
Summer ; — Fatigue ; — A Direction , Up ; — and A Spreading Out Unlawed
II ( notes from inside a dark forest )
for whomever whispers
delay is nevertheless
a persona of there you go
forest nightingale makes more
Quick Draft
fresh to make
oh pilgrim
see , it ’ s the no horizon
III
I Felt a Fierce Unfreedom
The Concept Death Was Walking Around This Pill Sentence Structure
It Has Been Given Me To Understand Bats
No Unconceiving Cave
And I Do Desire Your Looking Back
It is Very Sculptural to Wake Up
The Be Thou Gaia Pastoral Air
Not On Its Own
Quick Draft 2
A Physics of Desire
In the Bee Latitudes 2
Curved Over the River
‡ ° § £ ¢ ∞ § the haloes on the Barbizon night lanterns
Concerning the Ode to a Focus Then a Free Fall
Acknowledgments
Notes
The author of The Tulip Sacrament, ’Annah Sobelman is a poet who has recently returned from living in Florence, Italy, to her home in America.
“The second collection of poems—risky and rife with grammatical intensity and simultaneously grounded in the experience of being a woman in the world—marked by a beauty of language and emotion.”—Publishers Weekly
T H E G H O S T S A R E D I F F E R E N T F R O M T H E
L O V E O F S O M E B R A I N S
the doves float above the street , back
and forth and back again until one white female sticks
to the window pane .
Hammerhead of
love landing on the skull with its calcium
cartons , hunting for prey on the ledges ? — in the cartoons ,
the slim shell of bone opened and the brains gushed ‘ forth ’—
Do the doves feel elected by what is sticky ? It isn’t that you
didn ’ t want to be materialized at least as corporeal as snow
the Solstice loves ; — but so do ghosts the most frozen
parts of winter bleed into — fall into
us , they ’ ll beg , almost soundproof room profound pale skinniness
through which no one else can shove — You are sympathetic to the pursuit of a
surface that will not try to cap-
ture you and
call itself love —
I N T H E B E E L A T I T U D E S
Once the length of the sun
gets stuck on my breasts ( Patti Smith wails
out milk rather than purple on the other side of the bee
culture ) my mouth does not tilt as much toward the night-
life layers of vowels and
consonants before they get said , a passionate
and preverbal shattering of one ’ s ideas of restraint such
as the children I may, or may not give birth to— anyway , I had tasted the length
of the sun in the milky
substances which tilt toward high yellower layers — Later more in the
mouth itself as longing — Later in the
longness of sky above and
beside , in female brain , of male
brain , a mouth now full of sun which
is not yet purple , still not colour yet itself ,
part of the body ’ s fullest future which the sun and I cannot seem to get
to the end of — But , once a mouth gets filled with
the purple or , gets stuck
for awhile on another human ’ s
breasts , it feels newborn and erotic to suck on the beginning
in this way whose round long droopings
have this lush purple birthmark on one of their sides , and do not overshadow
the face with aqua milkiness ardour as , if they’d been
tasted , our mothers ’ breasts might have done — I sucked and
sucked anyway the way I do on one who looks like my idea of
Virgil — a sun outside his knees — hiking into the hills of
purple , gathering bees for
later — Etruscan smelling ! —
( my beginning also
contemplative with the
preverbal / is where the sun and the mosquitoes smell more
like the other side of the bee culture ) ; the mild awakeness feeling of
lying in a hammock even overshadowing my mouth
to muteness , for a while — The length of sun and its tastes
giving to the human and some parts of
my unhuman world , our futures —
their full yellow valour are glints .
And we have had consciences of purple ,
except in that haloing around bees
which give their multishades
to many many many many , with a shove ) oh , now less
than a full destination further off , throbbling —