National Anthem
by Kevin Prufer
(Four Way)
The America of Prufer’s fourth collection is an empire in decline, a medicated landscape (“snow / like little tranquilizers all over the yard”) peopled by pilgrims to shopping malls. The book opens with a panoramic vision of the aftermath of apocalypse—“expired” cars, silenced TVs, coffins “unmoored and happy with the storm”—but ends intimately, with a child’s memory of his first encounter with death; the thin wire between political failure and personal grief runs taut throughout. In the eerie centerpiece poem, the suburbs are sealed under an enormous parachute, its nylon shimmering; icicles line the seams and crash into the streets, and the narrator walks for days, never finding the edge.
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