Call Waiting.

Front Cover -- Title Page -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- I -- June, Swoon -- River Run -- Slake -- Debridement -- The Absolute Sweetness of Decay -- Still we pretend at modesty -- No Place -- Self-Reliance -- Any Questions? -- Another Birthday -- These Days -- Anything special -- Pole Star -- Say again? I didn't catch that -- Time and Tide -- Berkshire Spring, False Dawn -- Climate Change -- 'Warning! Cliff Edge! Danger!!' -- Drowning Narcissus -- Chancellorsville -- Surplus Value -- Relict -- Material Culture -- Aces and Eights -- Irish Graves -- Caesura -- So Much for Irony -- Clothes Make the Man -- Inheritance -- The Highway System -- Canker -- Bone Cold -- II -- The River Refuses its Name -- Life's Blood -- Ball's Bluff -- On a landscape turned red -- Captain's Watch -- 1914 -- The Magdalene Laundries -- Jack and Bill -- Jackson Pollock Crashes his Car -- E.D. -- Aesthetic Contemplation -- Two San Francisco Poets -- Weldon Kees' Car -- Jack Spicer -- Nighthawks -- For Elizabeth Bishop -- Camouflage Self-Portrait -- Itch -- Adulthood -- Federal City Scenes -- Myriads of Eternity -- For those who hear what we cannot -- Saints Today -- Internal Difference -- Permanent Record -- Teleology -- Hypocrite lecteur. Whose semblable? -- Hemingway's Iceberg -- Isn't it pretty to think so? -- Jamais Vu or Was It? -- Still Life, Grand Central Station -- Alcools -- Marginalia -- Call Waiting. Waiting… -- Not Enough Room to Swing a Cat -- Summer Vacation -- The Sublime Meets Prairie Town -- III -- Zero Sum -- Anti-Hymn/Antonym: A Prophecy -- At 9:45 a.m. -- Unintended Consequences -- Colossus -- CCTV -- Death from Above -- Def: Extreme Rendition -- The End of History -- Acknowledgements and Notes.

This full-length poetry collection from art historian David C. Ward combines wry meditations on 21st-century life, work, and family with observations of America-its landscapes, its history, its social and foreign policy. Ward's poems are peopled by those who seem never quite able to inhabit their own lives: from well-known figures such as Andy Warhol and vanished poet Weldon Kees to Ward's own father, a nighthawk playing poker against himself in the early hours. The book's final section turns an unflinching gaze on the post-9/11 United States and its self-deceptions.

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Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, 2019. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries.