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Tupelo PressHuman Nature
by Gary Soto
$16.95
Paperback Original ISBN: 978-1-932195-84-2 SynopsisGary Soto’s poems are fast, funny, heartrending, and achingly believable, like Polaroid love letters, or snatches of music heard out of a passing car; patches of beauty like patches of sunlight; the very pulse of a life.—Joyce Carol Oates I read Gary Soto’s poems with delight. There’s no one I know, certainly in this language, who writes like him. For me, his is a deeply important poetry.—Gerald Stern Soto may be the most exciting poet of poverty in America to emerge since James Wright and Philip Levine.—Poetry Gary Soto is a consummate storyteller . . . intelligent, funny, and bitingly honest. He is also a craftsman, a master of metaphor and simile, his language capable of dazzling somersaults. Gary Soto’s poems should be required reading in MFA programs and migrant labor camps. He’s that good.—Martín Espada Gary Soto’s eleventh book of poems for adults, Human Nature is full of arresting images and surprising scenarios — and probably more uncanny opening lines than in any book you’ll read all year. These poems pretend to be “simple” portraits of remembered youth and of life at the other end, where a man is walking into old age. Yet their surface transparency gives way to burrowing (often troubling) insights. Over and over he finds arresting, surprising cause for pausing and looking further, deeper, in the motley comedy of street life and family life and the erotic realm of memory. There is comedy on almost every page, but also the sadness of perceived futility. As a poet, Soto’s characteristic vantage is bemused and amused, both. He has long been praised for his rich descriptions and strange imaginative leaps; he is well known for poems of childhood that are really open and exposed, and his work has connected powerfully with teenaged readers and their teachers. New in Human Nature are the bittersweet poems of aging, as an artist wonders aloud how something as quiet and delicate as a poem can hold its own in the raucous, rude, careening mayhem of our national public life. What should a poet do? Keep singing, of course. The muse must be given homage, no matter how worn out she looks. And even in his bruised uncertainty, Soto always brings a distinctive verbal mischief and descriptive beauty to the task of praising our not always very pretty world. Selected PoemsThe Way It IsI’m hunkered before an early-bird special, My eye on a glass of the lowest-priced red. I promise to pace myself, One sip for every third bite of overcooked pasta. What does this mean that I bring These little tubes of pasta to my mouth By quick jerky motions? Later, at the Rose Garden, A youngish man comes up, snaps his fingers, And says excitedly, “I had your class. You’re professor… Professor . . . What was the class? It was so good. . . .” I should have had a pricier second glass Of Zin. After all, wine makes you nostalgic, Warms us to offer up a smile that’s all dentures, Something not true, something like, “Oh, yes, that class, it was . . .” Both of us snapping our fingers, Both of us without remembered names. The Gritty House Wind whipped sand and sent a spray Onto the just-painted wood siding. My father, an angry man, dipped his brush Into the ground, stirred it, and howled, “Why not more!” The paint dried on this plain-faced house. The kitchen light was turned on, then off, A desperate signal for help. There was distress in every banged pot, In the coded slap of the screen door, in the squeak of an oven door, In the nails rising like tombstones from our ancient floor. Smoke unraveled from a lopsided chimney. None of us was happy, none of us knew love. Scared of the inside, I ate mostly on the back porch. After playing with the paint bucket’s lid, Like my angry father I cursed wind and sand— Flecks of paint staining my knuckles. I raked them across the gritty wood siding, A sort of sandpaper, to smooth things out. When I was Sixteen I asked Richard, “What did you do yesterday?” He said, “I helped my brother hang Barbara Over the balcony.” I could see this, Richard’s older brother, mean at heart, Holding his wife Barbara by one leg And she screaming, “Stop it! Stop it.” Her dress would be around her head Like a parachute, and he and Richard Laughing at the sight of her girdle. This was 1965, no hippie fun at all, Though we had drawn happy faces In the dirt yard. I ate an orange, Tossed the peels to the chickens, Slowly got up, and left on my bicycle. In truth, I loved Richard’s brother’s wife, But destroyed in my mind From then on she was the young bride Hanging over the balcony, Her crying muffled by the dress Around her face, a veil of shame. Tupelo Press |