Poetry 365 - Evanston Public Library

This month for Poetry 365 we’re highlighting Rebecca Lindenberg’s highly anticipated debut Love, An Index. Praised by National Book Award winner Terrence Hayes for “recovering, reclaiming, and remaking the elegy form,” this one-of-a kind collection serves as Lindenberg’s memorial to her late partner Craig Arnold, an acclaimed poet who disappeared while hiking a Japanese volcano in 2009. At once plainspoken and uniquely musical, the volume stays fresh with forms both adopted and invented including prose poems, sparse free verse, and the lengthy title poem which appears as an index. Beautiful, fierce, humbling, and human, this first title in the newly minted McSweeney’s Poetry Series is simply not to be missed. So make sure to sample an “index” poem below and don’t forget to stop back next month for Poetry 365.

VANISH, dematerialize. Poof! How does one sail

to the land of vanished things? And what color

does your flag have to be to get back?

VOLCANOES, we visited many: Vesuvius looming over Naples

like a history of violence and Pompeii’s ash

packed around a man-shaped hollow. The perfect cone

of Stromboli. Cloud-forests sweating around Poas,

its caldera cupping an aquamarine lake of boiling acid.

Thira’s thin crescent rising from the sea. A Mexican church

half-submerged in basalt. A cobbled path of fractured granite

descending into the North Atlantic. I thought I understood

your longing — it looked so much like mine.

VOLKSWAGON,

Golf (green), from Salt Lake City to Omaha in a day.

You were so angry because I’d stayed up late

the night before and couldn’t drive the first shift.

Later that summer, Duluth, Sault Sainte Marie,

Montreal, Marblehead. Harry Potter on tape,

your son asleep in the back with his feet on my lap

and his head resting on your guitar.

Golf (red), I could see you coming from so far

down the snowed-in road. Me at the bus station

freezing my ass off. You cranked the heat,

plucked off my wool cap, put your mouth over my ear.

VOW, I think as much now about the ones we failed to make

as the ones we faithfully kept.

Russell J. (Readers’ Services)

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