{"product_id":"9780307594839","title":"Seeing Stars: Poems","description":"\u003cp\u003ePraised as “wonderful, exuberant, unsettling” on its publication in the United Kingdom, Simon Armitage’s new collection brings us a vivid array of dramatic monologues, allegories, and tall tales.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAll are welcome at this twilit, visionary carnival: the man whose wife drapes a border curtain across the middle of the marital home; the black bear with a dark secret; the woman who arranges giant snowballs in the freezer. “My girlfriend won me in a sealed auction but wouldn’t \/ tell me how much she bid,” begins one speaker; “I hadn’t meant to go grave robbing with Richard Dawkins \/ but he can be very persuasive,” another tells us. The storyteller behind this human tapestry has about him a sly undercover idealism: he shares with many of his characters a star-gazing capacity for belief, or for being, at the very least, entirely “genuine in his disbelief.” In these startling poems, with their unique cartoon-strip energy and air of misrule, Armitage creates world after world, peculiar and always particular, where the only certainty is the unexpected.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eUnprecedented economic growth in my native country has brought mochaccino and broadband to where there was nothing but misery and disease, yet with loss of habitat the inevitable consequence; even the glade I was born in is now a thirty storey apartment block with valet parking and a nail salon. They scrape DNA from the inside of my cheek and freeze it, “just in case.” To the world I’m known by my stage name and am Richard to family and friends, but never Dick. Well-meaning tourists visiting the Cavern throw pastries and pieces of fruit despite notices regarding my sensitive nature and strict diet. I cried all night when John was shot, rubbed the tired circles of my eyes till they turned black. Please do not tap on the glass.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFrom \u003ci\u003eThe Last Panda\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47024139862256,"sku":"9780307594839","price":25.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9780307594839_p0.jpg?v=1763673233","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9780307594839","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}