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About Sight Lines
Product Description Winner of the 2019 National Book Award “The sight lines in Sze’s 10th collection are just that―imagistic lines strung together by jump-cuts, creating a filmic collage that itself seems to be a portrait of simultaneity.” ―The New York Times From the current phenomenon of drawing calligraphy with water in public parks in China to Thomas Jefferson laying out dinosaur bones on the White House floor, from the last sighting of the axolotl to a man who stops building plutonium triggers, Sight Lines moves through space and time and brings the disparate and divergent into stunning and meaningful focus. In this new work, Arthur Sze employs a wide range of voices―from lichen on a ceiling to a man behind on his rent―and his mythic imagination continually evokes how humans are endangering the planet; yet, balancing rigor with passion, he seizes the significant and luminous and transforms these moments into riveting and enduring poetry. “These new poems are stronger yet and by confronting time head on, may best stand its tests.” ― Lit Hub “The wonders and realities of the world as seen through travel, nature walks, and daily routine bring life to the poems in Sight Lines.” ― Library Journal Review “[Sze] brings together disparate realms of experience―astronomy, botany, anthropology, Taoism―and observes their correspondences with an exuberant attentiveness.”― The New Yorker “Sze's is a deeply humanist and erotic sensibility, utilizing an unadorned diction and language steeped in the metaphoric possibilities that exist for us by mere dint of being human.”―Eric P. Elshtain, Chicago Review “Arthur Sze is a demanding and valuable poet… While the influence of Eastern poetry is usually felt in American poetry as imagism, in Sze's poems, that tradition is present not just as a quality of perception, but of thought―made available to us in all its complexity through a precision of language so refined that it feels like marksmanship.”―Jacqueline Osherow, Antioch Review “Sze's free verse emphasizes at once how difficult, and how necessary, it is for us to imagine our world as a system whose ecologies and societies require us to care for all their interdependent parts.”― Publishers Weekly About the Author Arthur Sze is a Pulitzer Prize finalist, a National Book Award winner, and recipient of fellowships from Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Adamant Deer browse at sunrise in an apple orchard, while honey locust leaves litter the walk. A neighbor hears gunshots in the bosque and wonders who's firing at close range; I spot bear prints near the Pojoaque River but see no sign of the reported mountain lion. As chlorophyll slips into the roots of a cottonwood and the leaves burst into yellow gold, I wonder, where's our mortal flare? You can travel to where the Tigris and Euphrates flow together and admire the inventions of people living on floating islands of reeds; you can travel along an archipelago and hike among volcanic pools steaming with water and sulfuric acid; but you can't change the eventual, adamant body. Though death might not come like a curare- dipped dart blown out of a tube or slam at you like surf breaking over black lava rock, it will come―it will come―and it unites us― brother, sister, boxer, spinner―in this pact, while you inscribe a letter with trembling hand. Westbourne Street Porch light illuminating white steps, light over a garage door, darkness inside windows― and the darkness exposes the tenuous. A glass blower shapes a rearing horse that shifts, on a stand, from glowing orange to glistening crystal; suddenly the horse shatters into legs, head, body, mane. At midnight, “Fucking idiot!” a woman yells, shaking the house; along a hedge, a man sleeps, coat over head, legs sticking out; and, at 8 am, morning glories open on a fence; a backhoe heads up the street.
