The Gravity Soundtrack

Erin Keane

book cover


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Retail Price: $12.00
Subject Category: Poetry
Length: 88 pages
Size: 6 x 9 inches
Binding: paper
Published: October 2007
ISBN: 978-1-60226-000-9

 

With poems that are "as entertaining as they are compelling" (Greg Pape) The Gravity Soundtrack will please both veteran readers of poetry and those who've never before picked up a book of poems. In this debut collection Erin Keane explores subjects ranging from classic myth, philosophy and religion to rock 'n roll, pop culture and children's book characters. The poems are finely crafted, with a "confident and alert use of language" (Greg Pape),and each one shows keen insight into the nature of what it means to be human.

In The Gravity Soundtrack, the poet is not a voice from above passing truths down to the reader, but rather is right there with us in the muck and mire of human experience—and, all along, shows great compassion for our questioning, our losses, our uncertainty. In the end, Keane has few answers for this questioning, but, still, the book leaves us with a feeling of redemption and hope. Is it our very stories, she says, that finally redeem us: "I couldn't give you/anything to hold, so take this wakeful night/know it can't make sense. What's left? At least/make it a good story. An offering, one last" ("Grievous Angel").

Book Excerpts

Section I: Eternal Playback [PDF]

Table of Contents

I. Eternal Playback

The Gravity Soundtrack
The Clash See the Future Recording Give 'Em Enough Rope
The Tao of Big Daddy
Things to Say When I Meet Shane MacGowan
The Secondhand Record Store Clerk
The Jumbotron Nightmare
The Laff Box™
Johnny Cash: Live Inside the Gates
The One-Hit Wonders
Orpheus Retires
The Smallest Terminal
Science Fiction

II. The Express Line To Heaven

That Old Green Light
Sweet Aphrodite on a Bicycle
The Angels' Share
Priscilla Johnson Still Has Hands Like Leaves
To Melanin
Why We Do Anything
Body Shop: 3 a.m.
Aunt Molly's Advice to the Exhibitionist
Some Girls
The Equivalent of Ears

III. Never-ending Stories

The Secret Garden
Little Women
Where the Wild Things Are
The Little Prince
Curious George
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
Babar
James and the Giant Peach
Alice in Wonderland
Heidi
Winnie the Pooh
Madeline
Peter Pan
The Velveteen Rabbit

IV. Something Like Prayer

The Postmodern Cowboy's Regret
From a Colorado Giftshop
Germantown Prayer
The View Below Sea Level, November
Yellow
Resident Alien
Butchertown Sabbath
On Childlessness
The Dead Letter Office
Okay, I'm Invisible
Some Nights
The Nature of Our Looking
In the Thorne Rooms at the Art Institute
A Divine Infestation
Grievous Angel

Notes