Author: Carl Boon

Publisher:

Published: 2019-05-21

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 9781950124046

The poems in Carl Boon's debut collection, PLACES & NAMES, coalesce two kinds of history-the factual and the imagined-to produce a kind of intimacy that is greater than either fact or imagination. It is this sense of intimacy that brings the poems to life. We encounter real places sometimes-places we see on maps and highway signs-but also places that exist only in the imagination-mine or yours. We encounter names that are both recognizable and almost-or barely-remembered at all: Robert E. Lee next to one of a thousand men named Jackson who went to fight in Vietnam; Jorge Luis Borges next to an unknown boy from Clarita, Oklahoma, who himself would become a poet someday; Rocky Marciano in the basement shadows as a failed middleweight hammering the heavy bag in Northeast Ohio, hungry for more than beans or soup. And suddenly it becomes clear how intimately connected in this collection these places and names are as we range from Saigon to northern Iraq; Athens, Ohio, to Libya; Ankara to Pittsburgh; and a strange, sleepy place called Pomegranate Town where someone's infant dozes in the back of a car on a seaside highway. The people who inhabit these places seem, in a sense, to be them, inseparable from their geographies and histories, often unable to escape, bound by memory, nostalgia, and tradition.