{"product_id":"9781882295449","title":"Night of a Thousand Blossoms","description":"\u003cp\u003eIn these poems, the poet restlessly inhabits the night, finding it terrifying and beautiful, searching for meaning in the yard, the neighborhood, the heavens and every wise book he owns. These urban pastoral meditations employ ritual and repetition to create a kind of mantra, seeking surrender to that state of meditation leading to enlightenment—yet arguing with the idea of surrendering any attachments at all to this world we’ve been given to learn and love: a city garden cohabitated by ancient Romans and tattooed kids, automobiles and hollyhock, maurauding cats and the Buddha. “I should be satisfied with the household gods,” he mourns, but is satisfied with nothing, determined to fit the whole world into his poems lest the one essential thing slip by.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFrom “The One God is Mysterious”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe king and his queen are feasting. .\u003cbr\u003eThey recline, sumptuously, on long divans.\u003cbr\u003eand are attended by naked servants. They.\u003cbr\u003ecan have anything they want, this much is.\u003cbr\u003eclear, and I believe they have been having.\u003cbr\u003esex with one another and with the servants.\u003cbr\u003eWhy wouldn’t they? Who among the servants. .\u003cbr\u003ewould not be honored to help? And it’s Babylon.\u003cbr\u003eafter all, and doesn’t Babylon exist in your.\u003cbr\u003ememory? Isn’t Babylon the clear rumbling.\u003cbr\u003eof your heart at ease with its every craving—.\u003cbr\u003enot the way it is now, fenced off with spiked wire.\u003cbr\u003eand old pipes, with signs telling the pedestrians.\u003cbr\u003eto beware: the litter, the old cans rusting. No, .\u003cbr\u003ethis is my own memory of excess and extravagance, .\u003cbr\u003eof abandonment to the weight of everything.\u003cbr\u003ethat pulls me down to ruin, those same ticks.\u003cbr\u003eand voices that lift me up and fill me with breath.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Frank Gaspar’s poems are agile and forceful, their narratives clear and absorbing. In them, he is speaking to the reader—but also to himself, or perhaps to some hazy divinity or to the blue sky. I felt in his voice no attempt to persuade me of anything. I felt only the abiding imperative to get it right. Which is, of course, what real writing is all about.”—Mary Oliver\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Alice James Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47057841520880,"sku":"9781882295449","price":13.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9781882295449_p0.jpg?v=1769895297","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9781882295449","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}