Stories That Listen [Paperback]

Priscilla Becker, whose first book of poems, Internal West, won The Paris Review Book Prize, has written an astonishingly precise second collection, Stories That Listen. These poems attempt to come to terms with absences personal and global: one speaker wonders if a former partner still uses her map which showed the world / before it broke up into separate / continents. Another, missing a departed friend, retraces her steps, took a tour of your former apartments. The recipient of a letter containing a fraction of an ounce of Chanel Mademoiselle attempts to understand the senders motives, tried to scrape together enough dust / to fill a bowl or roll a minuscule cigarette. / I thought perhaps that this was your intent. Stories That Listen offers a science of the human, a way to understand the world through watching closely. Becker deftly slows action downwe see fingers curl /around my coffee cupto find the remarkable, the noteworthy, in the everyday. Quirky, at times outright funny, always wise, Stories That Listen is a resonant, rewarding read.

Spirited and fragmented poetry that echoes the way we think and remember.

PRISCILLA BECKER writes music reviews, essays and book reviews. She teaches at Pratt Institute and Columbia University in NYC.

White Tone The Inner Life Hypnosis Blue Statuary Euthanasia afters Hatred of Men with Blond Eyebrows Math Poem Sedentary Sea Organisms, Mostly Algae Logic Still Life Without Drugs Numberless Hand Series A Minor Language Midwestern Communication by the Remnants of Fire Reconstruction Psalm for No One Monksbane Recurrence of Childhood Paralysis On Being Left for No One Simulation Moving Images Leaving Song Monarch Words Above a Poem Corner & Square Natural Cause Dr Hegys Magic Table Last in Winter Series Retraction of Vow On Nothing Part of Water Series Disambiguation Only Something Seasonal Poem Changing ContoulcZ