Ninety-five Nights of Listening: Poems

Malinda Markham's peoms are inspired in part by her fascination with Japanese language, art, and literature. Her reactions to and interpretations of that country's history, culture, and people are in these verses, echoing with the voices and silences of women across time. Markham imagines the experiences of many women: a geisha laments her past in "Geisha Considered as Making," as a mother laments for her daughter's future in "Yield to This." Markham is intrigued with how language tries but ultimately fails to hold memory in place. She grapples with the translation of words and feeling and shows how this failure also brings a searching for belief - a word that repeats throughout these poems - in a world that cannot allow it. Writes Cole Swenson, "Markham's language has the delicacy of the fine bones of the inner ear; it is, itself, a form of listening - to insects, birds, traffic, to the world. Her listening brings things into being, catching the nuances of change, from season to season, culture to culture, impression to language. This is a radiant collection."

Malinda Markham received her MFA in poetry from the University of Iowa. She has been published in the Paris Review, Conjunctions, and elsewhere. She teaches at Daito Bunka University in Tokyo.

contents

Foreword by Carol Muske-Dukes xi

I.

Woman Bathing 3 Instruction (Against Limited Disaster) 5 Being Glass 6 Things That Seldom Remain in Place 7 Geisha Considered as Making 9 Calculate Where to Begin 10 Topographical Concern 11 Anatomy of Resemblance 12 Postcard—a memory carried in the body 13 Equation 14 Recalling the Start 15 Before the River Freezes in Place 17 Yield to This 19

II.

The Field of Choice. And Choosing. 23 Being Glass, the Glint of Sun 26 The Border Between 27 Gift 28 Prime Movement and Other Divinations 29 What Magnitudes Sing Us 31 Affair Ending in Touch 32 Because the Cup Is Furred, I Cannot Drink 33 Museum Rehearsal 34 Postcard—Without Grace 39

III.

Gold Filigree Sharp on the Neck 43 Conversation in Likeness 45 Hôtel des Pyrénées 46 Oblivion Fruit 48

A History of Vinegar and Reprieve 49 Persimmons and a Kind of Regret 53 Survival & Disembodied Existence 54 Mistranslate (Because Meaning Is Not Enough) 55 To Recant What Is Needed 57 Five Stories of Demand 58 First Received 60 The Perceptible World 61