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Sightseer in This Killing City

Part of Penguin Poets

Author Eugene Gloria
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$18.00 US
Penguin Adult HC/TR | Penguin Books
On sale Jun 04, 2019 | 112 Pages | 9780143133841
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A fourth collection from a prize-winning poet whose "gift is breathtaking" (Naomi Shihab Nye)

Eugene Gloria's Sightseer in This Killing City captures the surreal and disorienting feelings of the present. In the wake of recent presidential elections in the United States and in the Philippines, Gloria's latest collection sharpens his obsession with arrivals and departures, gun violence, displacement, cultural legacy, and the bitter divisions in America. Through the voice of Nacirema, the central persona of the collection, we are introduced to a character who chooses mystery and inhabits landscapes fraught with beauty and brutality. Gloria quotes melodies from seventies soul and jazz, blending the urban lament of Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane with the idiom of Stevie Wonder and Fela Kuti. Sightseer in this Killing City is an argument for grace and perseverance in an era of bombast and bullies.
IMPLICIT BODY

Of my self-creation is this legend
of my betrayals, my disloyalty to my origins.
 
Of my once and future past,
of rajas and gilded palaces,
of brown sailors building empires, I lay no claim.
 
I lay no claim to your founding fathers,
no claim to pearl divers and tattooed pirates
jumping ship to grow a colony in Louisiana.
 
What I’ve inherited is this feeding frenzy
for rainbow, rainbow, rainbow,
this multigenerational spectral light show
 
inducing a diarrhea of bullets; and no arrests.
I’m the youngest son of a youngest son,
a second baseman in the minor leagues,
 
a family trope deputized to react
and bleed—whose only compensation
is his own capacious longing.
 
Hand me your gun, America,
and let my body be the soundtrack
to the spectacle of our recent events.
 
If only this miasmic island of sundown
towns and Bible colleges, of folksy neighbors
with their hiya doin’ gestures and holding
keys to the kingdom come raining down
with molten rocks upon this megalomania
 
of abandoned cities, of cowslip turnips, of holy
JesuschildrenofAmerica, of thee I sing!
 
Call me Mr. Gone / who’s done made / some other plans.
All that remains is nostalgia
and this aching torso of blue.
Copyright © 2019 by Eugene Gloria. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Eugene Gloria was born in Manila, Philippines, and raised in San Francisco. He was educated at San Francisco State University, Miami University of Ohio, and the University of Oregon. His first collection of poetry, Drivers at the Short-Time Motel, was selected for the 1999 National Poetry Series and also won the Asian American Literary Award. Gloria is also the recipient of a Fulbright Research Grant, a Poetry Society of America award, and a Pushcart Prize. He teaches at DePauw University and lives in Greencastle, Indiana. View titles by Eugene Gloria

About

A fourth collection from a prize-winning poet whose "gift is breathtaking" (Naomi Shihab Nye)

Eugene Gloria's Sightseer in This Killing City captures the surreal and disorienting feelings of the present. In the wake of recent presidential elections in the United States and in the Philippines, Gloria's latest collection sharpens his obsession with arrivals and departures, gun violence, displacement, cultural legacy, and the bitter divisions in America. Through the voice of Nacirema, the central persona of the collection, we are introduced to a character who chooses mystery and inhabits landscapes fraught with beauty and brutality. Gloria quotes melodies from seventies soul and jazz, blending the urban lament of Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane with the idiom of Stevie Wonder and Fela Kuti. Sightseer in this Killing City is an argument for grace and perseverance in an era of bombast and bullies.

Excerpt

IMPLICIT BODY

Of my self-creation is this legend
of my betrayals, my disloyalty to my origins.
 
Of my once and future past,
of rajas and gilded palaces,
of brown sailors building empires, I lay no claim.
 
I lay no claim to your founding fathers,
no claim to pearl divers and tattooed pirates
jumping ship to grow a colony in Louisiana.
 
What I’ve inherited is this feeding frenzy
for rainbow, rainbow, rainbow,
this multigenerational spectral light show
 
inducing a diarrhea of bullets; and no arrests.
I’m the youngest son of a youngest son,
a second baseman in the minor leagues,
 
a family trope deputized to react
and bleed—whose only compensation
is his own capacious longing.
 
Hand me your gun, America,
and let my body be the soundtrack
to the spectacle of our recent events.
 
If only this miasmic island of sundown
towns and Bible colleges, of folksy neighbors
with their hiya doin’ gestures and holding
keys to the kingdom come raining down
with molten rocks upon this megalomania
 
of abandoned cities, of cowslip turnips, of holy
JesuschildrenofAmerica, of thee I sing!
 
Call me Mr. Gone / who’s done made / some other plans.
All that remains is nostalgia
and this aching torso of blue.
Copyright © 2019 by Eugene Gloria. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Author

Eugene Gloria was born in Manila, Philippines, and raised in San Francisco. He was educated at San Francisco State University, Miami University of Ohio, and the University of Oregon. His first collection of poetry, Drivers at the Short-Time Motel, was selected for the 1999 National Poetry Series and also won the Asian American Literary Award. Gloria is also the recipient of a Fulbright Research Grant, a Poetry Society of America award, and a Pushcart Prize. He teaches at DePauw University and lives in Greencastle, Indiana. View titles by Eugene Gloria

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