Research Catalog

Title

Making love to Roget's wife : poems new and selected / Ron Koertge.

Author

Koertge, Ronald.

Publication

Fayetteville, Ark. : University of Arkansas Press, 1997.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

113 pages; 24 cm

Summary

• In plain, unpretentious language, with brutal honesty, Ron Koertge can meld violence, love, human ugliness, joy, and modern depravity into a short lyric that makes us laugh out loud or socks us in the gut. His images arrive in giant clown shoes - cigars the size of Florida, the plastic man's counter-length arms - or neatly packaged in carefully observed detail, as he writes of the "black little hearts" of ants or an ape's "dark and leathery breast.".
• Through every poem, there runs a constant and sincere humanity, a voice that laughs at itself, often goads us a bit, but always stuns and enlightens us when we discover something of ourselves gambling with the crowd at the racetrack, driving from the parking lot of the Mexican restaurant, or shambling with the distraught parent leaving the hospital.
• In Making Love to Roget's Wife, Ron Koertge offers his best work from twenty-three years and a dozen earlier collections. With twenty-five new poems, and over eighty from previous books, this selection reawakens us to the presence of a superbly honed comic voice.

Contents

• The Art of Poetry -- What She Wanted -- Loving Ugly -- Ozzie Nelson Dead of Cancer -- Admission Requirements of U.S. and Canadian Dental Schools -- Soothing the Unheralded Organs -- Panty Hose -- Plastic Man, Alone in the Luncheonette, Reaches the Length of the Counter for the Salt -- Beautiful Eyes for a Boy -- The Manager of the Drive-In Dairy -- Secrets of Writing Revealed at Last -- Things That Make You So Scared You Can't Swallow So You Start to Cry and You Tell Them That You'll Do Anything If They'll Just Leave You Alone -- A Dazed Survivor Recounts the Events Leading Up to the Tragedy -- Christmas Card -- Moving Day -- To Impress the Girl Next Door -- Guys at the Races -- Future Farmers of America -- What a Varied Place the World Is So Trusting and Strange So Deserving of Love and Praise -- Victims -- Orphan -- Field Report from Sodom -- Lazarus -- Mr. Big -- Killing Time -- I Never Touch My Penis --
• On the Anniversary of His Death the Men of the Village Meet to Talk about Frankenstein -- "The Things Is Not to Let Go of the Vine" -- Diary Cows -- Touring the Creches -- A Word of Prayer in the Parking Lot of a Mexican Restaurant -- The Undead -- Days Off -- With a Million Things to Do, the Doctor Muses, Anyway -- Written Almost in the Dark -- On the Way Home From ICU -- For My Daughter -- Dirty Post Cards -- "These Students Couldn't Write Their Way Out of a Paper Bag." -- Ganesha -- Playing Doctor -- 5:00 -- On the Origin of Animal Demographics and Communication -- If You Lived Here You'd Be Home Now -- Caesar's Gallic Wars -- Searchlights -- Horse & Cows -- Sidekicks -- Inventions of Troglodytes -- Boy's Life -- The Mummy -- Men & Women -- Have You Heard the One about the Soul? -- Excerpts from "God's Secret Diary" -- She --
• Not Only Naked Indian Girls and Booze but 10-Point Bucks That Line Up Just Begging to Be Shot and Bass in Shoals So Thick a Man Could Walk across the Water on Their Backs -- Night -- Pornography -- Green -- Coming Out -- The Strain of It All Drives Bambi Mad -- Missing Persons -- The History of Poetry -- Darkness Fell -- Nurses at the Beach -- Christmas Eve -- Sex Object -- At Gerlach's -- Nags -- Coloring -- The War -- All Thumbs -- Summer Job -- Easter -- The Last Siesta -- Baby, It's You -- Sweaters -- Now and Then -- "Fundamentalist Group Rejects Nudist Campsite" -- Grace -- Trail's End Curios -- My Name -- Out of Body Experiences -- Thirteenth Birthday Party -- The Other Side -- Ruidoso, N. M. -- A Little Kid -- The Man in the Moon -- Road Kill -- In Search Of -- Making Love to Roget's Wife -- The Lost Continent -- I Take My Toes -- The Kids-Only Motel -- Lava Soap -- An Infinite Number of Monkeys -- Hula -- Flirting with Poetry -- First Grade --
• "On the Tip of My Tongue" -- Boy -- Books -- The Abstraction Ladder -- A Night School Teacher Looks at His Final Class -- Hermits -- A Guide to Refreshing Sleep.

ISBN

• 1557284628 (cloth : alk. paper)
• 155728461X (paper : alk. paper)

LCCN

96033030

OCLC

• 35115023
• ocm35115023

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries