University of Wisconsin Press, 2017 Paper: 978-0-299-31164-3 Library of Congress Classification PS3558.O538P37 2017 Dewey Decimal Classification 811.54
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC
ABOUT THIS BOOK
Charles Hood shows us a strange and perplexing world that runs on sadness, microbrews, snack cakes, and inexplicable magic. Brimming with natural history and bright flashes of language, his poems focus on transformations. He takes us from Paleolithic caves to modern movie theaters, and along the way we fix time machines with Tom Hanks, enter a Rousseau painting, and collect diamonds from the moons of Neptune.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Charles Hood is a writer of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction, a photographer, and an artist. His many books include Mouth; South x South; Río de Dios: 13 Histories of the Los Angeles River; The Half-Life of Salt: Voices of the Enola Gay; and Red Sky, Red Water: Powell on the Colorado. A longtime animal spotter, he has seen more than six hundred mammal species and more than five thousand species of wild birds. In his global travels, he has trekked to the South Pole, been lost in a Tibetan whiteout, and recovered from bubonic plague. He lives in Palmdale, California.
REVIEWS
"Simultaneously dazzling, playful, witty, goofy, hilarious, and profound, Partially Excited States carries us through our past into the present and even into our future somewhere in outer space. This is a mature book that manages to be idiosyncratic in its thinking but universal in its concerns." —Susan Mitchell
"These poems give us reality entire, ablaze with fires at once heavenly and infernal. This is a poet whose ecstasy and despair present two sides of the same blade, sharpened on a grim and gorgeous world." —Katharine Coles
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
1. Invisible Terrain
The Wand Chooses the Wizard
How My Parents Died
Bois de Boulogne
The Invention of Punctuation
State Insects
Bow Hunting in Nevada
All Males Die after Mating
Landscape Is Just
This Is Not an Ekphrastic Poem
The Life of Jasper Johns
Sargent Never Painted
You’re Like This Girl in Lone Pine
Pelt Vault, Natural History Museum
Somewhere Near the Rental Car Counter
Street Trees of San Francisco
On the Island of the Not-So-Broken Poets
Ikea
Funeral Plans
The Dictionary of Artists’ Models
Magazine Tiger, Harper’s Bazaar
2. The History of Hell in America
The History of Hell in America
3. Escape Velocity
Sunrise on Mercury
Getting Home without Tom Hanks
The Earth as Seen from Earth
Mars with Fear and Dread:
1. Phobos
2. Demos
Another Thing That Happened
Journal Entry on the Way to Jupiter and Saturn
One of the Nicer Moons of Jupiter
The History of Jupiter 4 (“Callisto”)
Saturn Times Saturn Divided by Saturn
Lassell of Bolton Discovers Triton
Neptune 7 (“Larissa”) Voyager I Passes the Edge of the Solar System
Notes
University of Wisconsin Press, 2017 Paper: 978-0-299-31164-3
Charles Hood shows us a strange and perplexing world that runs on sadness, microbrews, snack cakes, and inexplicable magic. Brimming with natural history and bright flashes of language, his poems focus on transformations. He takes us from Paleolithic caves to modern movie theaters, and along the way we fix time machines with Tom Hanks, enter a Rousseau painting, and collect diamonds from the moons of Neptune.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Charles Hood is a writer of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction, a photographer, and an artist. His many books include Mouth; South x South; Río de Dios: 13 Histories of the Los Angeles River; The Half-Life of Salt: Voices of the Enola Gay; and Red Sky, Red Water: Powell on the Colorado. A longtime animal spotter, he has seen more than six hundred mammal species and more than five thousand species of wild birds. In his global travels, he has trekked to the South Pole, been lost in a Tibetan whiteout, and recovered from bubonic plague. He lives in Palmdale, California.
REVIEWS
"Simultaneously dazzling, playful, witty, goofy, hilarious, and profound, Partially Excited States carries us through our past into the present and even into our future somewhere in outer space. This is a mature book that manages to be idiosyncratic in its thinking but universal in its concerns." —Susan Mitchell
"These poems give us reality entire, ablaze with fires at once heavenly and infernal. This is a poet whose ecstasy and despair present two sides of the same blade, sharpened on a grim and gorgeous world." —Katharine Coles
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
1. Invisible Terrain
The Wand Chooses the Wizard
How My Parents Died
Bois de Boulogne
The Invention of Punctuation
State Insects
Bow Hunting in Nevada
All Males Die after Mating
Landscape Is Just
This Is Not an Ekphrastic Poem
The Life of Jasper Johns
Sargent Never Painted
You’re Like This Girl in Lone Pine
Pelt Vault, Natural History Museum
Somewhere Near the Rental Car Counter
Street Trees of San Francisco
On the Island of the Not-So-Broken Poets
Ikea
Funeral Plans
The Dictionary of Artists’ Models
Magazine Tiger, Harper’s Bazaar
2. The History of Hell in America
The History of Hell in America
3. Escape Velocity
Sunrise on Mercury
Getting Home without Tom Hanks
The Earth as Seen from Earth
Mars with Fear and Dread:
1. Phobos
2. Demos
Another Thing That Happened
Journal Entry on the Way to Jupiter and Saturn
One of the Nicer Moons of Jupiter
The History of Jupiter 4 (“Callisto”)
Saturn Times Saturn Divided by Saturn
Lassell of Bolton Discovers Triton
Neptune 7 (“Larissa”) Voyager I Passes the Edge of the Solar System
Notes
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC