MY LOVERS IN THE YEAR OF RAT

OR A SHORT CONDENSED LIST OF TEN (OR SO) BOOKS I COULDN'T AND DIDN'T WANT TO LIVE WITHOUT IN NO, OR, IN A SUBLIMINALLY PARTICULAR, ORDER:

preluded by a few lines from Sabines' book, translated by Jeffrey Levine and Ernesto Trejo:

So here's how it's done: you put on your mask,

assume your voice, embroider your dreams.

Put on the face of a lover,

the wounded face,

the contented smile,

Monday and Tuesday, and the month of March,

and the year of human solidarity,

you eat on the hour as best as you can,

and sleep and make love, 

and go on secretly rehearsing for the final act

that no one will witness.

Hallelujah Blackout by Alex Lemon

Little Boat by Jean Valentine

Tarumba by Jaime Sabines

Watching the Spring Festival by Frank Bidart

Exceptions and Melancholies by Ralph Angel

Envelope of Night by Michael Burkard

My Emily Dickinson by Susan Howe

Truant Lover by Juliet Patterson

Warhorses by Yusef Komunyakaa

The Man with Night Sweats by Thom Gunn

Factory of Tears by Valzhyna Mort

Theories and Apparitions by Mark Doty

Hagiography by Jenn Currin

Totem by Gregory Pardlo

A Worldly Country by John Ashberry

"he didn't look like a good loser, a dark angry expression on his face, his head down, and while the men, speaking French, scattered along the porch in search of glasses of ice-cold champagne, the lady went up to the little gaucho, who was left standing alone, holding his horse's reins in his left hand (at the other end of the long yard the little gaucho's father headed off toward the stables with the horse the German had ridden), and told him, in an incomprehensible language, not to be sad, that he had ridden an excellent race but her husband was good too and more experienced, words that to the little gaucho sounded like the moon, like the passage of clouds across the moon, like a slow storm, and then the little gaucho looked up at the lady with the eyes of a bird of prey, ready to plunge a knife into her at the navel and slice up to the breasts, cutting her wide open, his eyes shining with a strange intensity, like the eyes of a clumsy young butcher, as the lady recalled, which didn't stop her from following him without protest when he took her by the hand and led her to the other side of the house, to a place where a wrought-iron pergola stood, bordered by flowers and trees that the lady had never seen in her life or which at that moment she thought she had never seen in her life, and she even saw a fountain in the park, a stone fountain, in the center of which balanced on one little foot, a creole cherub with smiling features danced, part European and part cannibal, perpetually bathed by three jets of water that spouted at its feet, a fountain sculpted from a single piece of black marble, a fountain that the lady and the little gaucho admired at length, until a distant cousin of the rancher appeared (or a mistress whom the rancher had lost in the deep folds of memory), telling her in brusque and serviceable English that her husband had been looking for her for some time . . . 

(I'm just in the watching the first petal of this novel curl black at the edge of its rose, but goddamn I'm drinking it, Bolano's strange year. This interlude is an excerpt of one sentence that dreams for five pages!)

2666 by Roberto Bolano

The Quiet Girl by Peter Hoeg

My Name Is Red by Orhan Pamuk

The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

Grotesque by Natsuo Kirino

The Temple of the Golden Pavilion by Yukio Mishima

The White Book by Jean Cocteau

Queen of Fashion by Caroline Weber

Young Stalin by Simon Sebag Montefiore

The Sea by John Banville 

prologue: I did a bump or two of Heidegger off a mirror. In the mirror nearness is a gathering up of space, where we dwell among that absence which is our own, that we cradle, that we build to remark upon the abyss--only I have a Dyonisian tongue and would go a step further than Heidegger to say we dwellers seek monument and revolt. The boy was abducted by an alien, but they left the goat part behind. The poem was not abducted. It was a cup, a bridge, an embrace to frame that darkness which we know alone and fear and pray to. Darkness of the embrace that out of space and noplace beams us up into the Unseen. how Shadow drinks up loss. Chaos. Laughter like the sea. Liquid of the Year, I'll hold you here. 

. . . . . .