University of Utah Press, 2020 Paper: 978-1-60781-768-0 | eISBN: 978-1-60781-769-7 Library of Congress Classification PS3601.S5425 Dewey Decimal Classification 811.6
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
ABOUT THIS BOOK
Winner of the 2019 Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry
Zachary Asher’s second collection, gone bird in the glass hours, is a play in verse, featuring seven voices. It begins with a rabbi, bewildered and bent by personal grief, guided and beguiled by elusive Blue Postman into the world of “the glass hours” and its inhabitants.
Rooted in magical realism, gone bird in the glass hours experiments with multiple forms from epistles to centos, from fractals to prayers. These poems are brave in their excavations of grief and solace, wonder and rage, collective trauma and, ultimately, transcendence.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY Zachary Asher is the author of a previous poetry collection, Scarlight (Ravenna Press, 2014). He has an MFA in Creative Writing from Vanderbilt University, where he was a founding editor of Nashville Review. Today he lives and teaches in Los Angeles.
REVIEWS
“In Zachary Asher’s gone bird in the glass hours it is the grievers who heal the grieving. Here, life is insistent, whether it is a frog in the pulse or a river that refuses to dry up or the days when weeping both rejoices and sorrows. In Asher’s poems, poets and god divide and erase the languages of dark hymns, yet even through the sadness there’s still a joy that can take us back to the time when everyone we loved was still alive. In these poems there’s a way to be winged, a way to hope through the darkness.”
—Traci Brimhall, author of Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod and Our Lady of the Ruins
“Like some wandering twenty-first-century Chagall working his magic with words instead of paint, Zachary Asher upends and refreshes the visible world with the balance and grace of an acrobat. Floating and grounded, reverent and irreverent, gone bird in the glass hours is an elegy shot through with ode. Whether limning moments of epiphany or tragedy, ancient Judaic practice or daily ritual in our time of tech, the wonders in this poem play are informed by faith, sharpened by erotic love, and drenched in the color blue, in almost mystical celebration. A not-so-subterranean ode that dwells, above all, in the blue of radiant mystery.”
—Sarah Maclay, author of Music for the Black Room and The White Bride
"Zachary Asher writes of 'the accidental / beauty of being alive' in this moving and hybrid Jewish work—a mystic probing, a searchingly literary investigation into the mystery of our transience."
—Edward Hirsch, author of Gabriel and The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Contents
Forewordby Alberto Ríos
Chorale Personae
Act I—Rabbi’s Lost Sermons
Blue Postman visits Sunday morning
Rabbi and Surgeon over breakfast
notebook petals at the card shop café
bowl of bruises
my god : carlights
Rabbinic Literature
one night it rained
Instructions for Hibernal Solstice
Sermon before Bedtime
Heart Sūtra on Shabbat
Seeing Whales on Big Sur
Blue Postman returns by car
Act II—correspondence in the glass hours
La Cortina Levanta : Los Ojos de Lorca
Vine sings in the glass hours
outside the nun theatre
Ganesha enters the body laughing
Dear Rembrandt
Dear Galway
Stained Glass Tunnel : A Carson Cento
Abraham, Abraham
Mother of Laughter
Vine {reprise}
Vine & Rabbi find each other in the ghost bakery
Blue Postman sings
Act III—now the night heron
you said the ocean
ii
friday, december 14, 2012
tonight there is no yes
how often here the horse
ancient hebraic debate
vii
owl at the moon
gone blues
x
conch prayers
the veil blue heron
echolocation
acknowledgments
REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
If you are a student who cannot use this book in printed form, BiblioVault may be able to supply you
with an electronic file for alternative access.
Please have the accessibility coordinator at your school fill out this form.
University of Utah Press, 2020 Paper: 978-1-60781-768-0 eISBN: 978-1-60781-769-7
Winner of the 2019 Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry
Zachary Asher’s second collection, gone bird in the glass hours, is a play in verse, featuring seven voices. It begins with a rabbi, bewildered and bent by personal grief, guided and beguiled by elusive Blue Postman into the world of “the glass hours” and its inhabitants.
Rooted in magical realism, gone bird in the glass hours experiments with multiple forms from epistles to centos, from fractals to prayers. These poems are brave in their excavations of grief and solace, wonder and rage, collective trauma and, ultimately, transcendence.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY Zachary Asher is the author of a previous poetry collection, Scarlight (Ravenna Press, 2014). He has an MFA in Creative Writing from Vanderbilt University, where he was a founding editor of Nashville Review. Today he lives and teaches in Los Angeles.
REVIEWS
“In Zachary Asher’s gone bird in the glass hours it is the grievers who heal the grieving. Here, life is insistent, whether it is a frog in the pulse or a river that refuses to dry up or the days when weeping both rejoices and sorrows. In Asher’s poems, poets and god divide and erase the languages of dark hymns, yet even through the sadness there’s still a joy that can take us back to the time when everyone we loved was still alive. In these poems there’s a way to be winged, a way to hope through the darkness.”
—Traci Brimhall, author of Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod and Our Lady of the Ruins
“Like some wandering twenty-first-century Chagall working his magic with words instead of paint, Zachary Asher upends and refreshes the visible world with the balance and grace of an acrobat. Floating and grounded, reverent and irreverent, gone bird in the glass hours is an elegy shot through with ode. Whether limning moments of epiphany or tragedy, ancient Judaic practice or daily ritual in our time of tech, the wonders in this poem play are informed by faith, sharpened by erotic love, and drenched in the color blue, in almost mystical celebration. A not-so-subterranean ode that dwells, above all, in the blue of radiant mystery.”
—Sarah Maclay, author of Music for the Black Room and The White Bride
"Zachary Asher writes of 'the accidental / beauty of being alive' in this moving and hybrid Jewish work—a mystic probing, a searchingly literary investigation into the mystery of our transience."
—Edward Hirsch, author of Gabriel and The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Contents
Forewordby Alberto Ríos
Chorale Personae
Act I—Rabbi’s Lost Sermons
Blue Postman visits Sunday morning
Rabbi and Surgeon over breakfast
notebook petals at the card shop café
bowl of bruises
my god : carlights
Rabbinic Literature
one night it rained
Instructions for Hibernal Solstice
Sermon before Bedtime
Heart Sūtra on Shabbat
Seeing Whales on Big Sur
Blue Postman returns by car
Act II—correspondence in the glass hours
La Cortina Levanta : Los Ojos de Lorca
Vine sings in the glass hours
outside the nun theatre
Ganesha enters the body laughing
Dear Rembrandt
Dear Galway
Stained Glass Tunnel : A Carson Cento
Abraham, Abraham
Mother of Laughter
Vine {reprise}
Vine & Rabbi find each other in the ghost bakery
Blue Postman sings
Act III—now the night heron
you said the ocean
ii
friday, december 14, 2012
tonight there is no yes
how often here the horse
ancient hebraic debate
vii
owl at the moon
gone blues
x
conch prayers
the veil blue heron
echolocation
acknowledgments
REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
If you are a student who cannot use this book in printed form, BiblioVault may be able to supply you
with an electronic file for alternative access.
Please have the accessibility coordinator at your school fill out this form.
It can take 2-3 weeks for requests to be filled.
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE