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    Hosts and Guests: Poems
    Hosts and Guests: Poems
    Hosts and Guests: Poems
    Ebook78 pages27 minutes

    Hosts and Guests: Poems

    By Nate Klug

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    About this ebook

    An exciting new collection from a poet whose debut was praised by Colorado Review as “a seduction by way of small astonishments”

    Nate Klug has been hailed by the Threepenny Review as a poet who is “an original in Eliot’s sense of the word.” In Hosts and Guests, his exciting second collection, Klug revels in slippery roles and shifting environments. The poems move from a San Francisco tech bar and a band of Pokémon Go players to the Shakers and St. Augustine, as they explore the push-pull between community and solitude, and past and present. Hosts and Guests gathers an impressive range: critiques of the “immiserated quiet” of modern life, love poems and poems of new fatherhood, and studies of a restless, nimble faith. At a time when the meanings of hospitality and estrangement have assumed a new urgency, Klug takes up these themes in chiseled, musical lines that blend close observation of the natural world, social commentary, and spiritual questioning. As Booklist has observed of his work, “The visual is rendered sonically, so perfectly one wants to involve the rest of the senses, to speak the lines, to taste the syllables.”

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPrinceton University Press
    Release dateSep 15, 2020
    ISBN9780691203553
    Hosts and Guests: Poems

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      Book preview

      Hosts and Guests - Nate Klug

      1.

      MATINEE, END OF AUGUST

      The several dark

      where it was safe to feel

      still wearing off our faces,

      we stumble out

      with packs of strangers

      like red-eye passengers

      exiting a jet,

      crumbs and random warmths

      scattered among the recliner seats.

      The future, like a memory,

      seeps back slowly:

      which car, which color-coded floor …

      It ought to have rained.

      We’d wanted not to hurry.

      But every door

      to the reassembling world

      knows we’re there already,

      and slides open.

      GHOST AT THE HY-VEE

      I’d seen him just two months before—

      his brother’s service, condolences

      over orange juice— but when I shook Dan’s hand

      between aisles, my lips spoke Jack.

      Or Jack spoke Jack through me, slipping back

      by vowel rhyme, and scrambling to remain

      among the glint and friction of the jumbo carts,

      midday’s automatic produce mists. Cheeks drained,

      then flushed, believing too much at once

      to speak, I glanced toward Dan, his eyes

      fixed below on the ceiling fans’ reflections—

      each circulating blade leaking up

      through floor varnish. Returned to himself,

      he laughed it off, clapping my back like a man,

      like a Dan would, but more softly than that.

      CHRISTMAS EVE, I-80, 10 P.M.

      Tipped and stranded and sheathed in snow,

                  adjacent the rumble strip

      a semi-trailer slumbers through

                  its own

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