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New Release:

Pulling Apart, a new collection of poems from John Blackard, is now available for purchase.  John will be reading from Pulling Apart on March 3rd at the Oregon Literary Review Readers’ Series at Blackbird Wineshop.

Sample Poem from Pulling Apart:

Intimate Isolation

Another gathering of the newly-wed

and the nearly-dead that clearly needed

more than food and music, which, anyway,

was better than the conversation.

Language in all its forms seemed

a rant of betrayal to the taciturn and tight-lipped,

just as the last leaves of fall scratched

and scribbled off the back porch

into the oblivion of fields overgrown

with sumac and scrub pine.

This farming family’s golden age

of harvests was what they wouldn’t talk about,

left for the cash wages of public jobs

in town, as if their sin of omission

was forgettable.

There wasn’t much anyone could have said

that would scowl well, to use a farming

term about how earth falls away

from a sharp or dull plow.

I felt like a young fool once

again, overhearing my estranged brothers

tell about the time I drove

the tractor into the pond. Wasn’t a man

foolish to his family a man freed

in the world?

I stopped thinking long ago

I ought to be a tool made to clean up

a weedy row, the branching of the family

tree had anything really to do with me.

The master of ceremonies, one of those

old men who spoke in biblical rhythms,

kept pushing through his phlegmy recitation

of the family begets, a story always told

vaguely for the children among us.

I imagined our forefathers’ amens

for whatever they and God approved.

We are only blood-intimate, after all,

we are isolated by our common past.

Who can see himself in others, and not see

the worst? Day-dreaming or

demented—I couldn’t tell—the oldest

honorees seemed embarrassed

by the litany of silence between them.

Eventually, each dish of food was

blessed, tasted, and left on a table

or window ledge, the father and sons’

gospel quartet—minus the son just killed

in the war— ended its set with Before

the World Began.

Family secrets are what we tell

against ourselves in private, the scapegoats

and scapegraces pinned together

in the same rocky pasture.

About The Author:

John Blackard is a graduate of the University of North Carolina with advanced degrees in English Studies and Library Information Studies. He has three books of poems in print and a book about the golden age of paperback publishing. He has received Fulbright and National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships. He lives in Portland with his wife, the poet Valentina Gnup, and recently served as associate editor of Poetry Northwest. For more information, check out his website.

Image credit John Blackard.

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