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Cover credits:
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“With
The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands,
Nick Flynn has written a rare lyrical interrogation of brutality in the light
of conscience, an unsparing témoignage
that sings back to redacted documents, to memoranda governing torture
protocols, to night & prison & desert & darkness. This is a poetry
that should be read out before the Permanent Court of International Justice in
The Hague. Read and be filled with awe, sorrow and gratitude for this poet’s
gifts and spiritual courage."
—Carolyn Forché
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Price: $22.00 USD
Poetry 9781555975746, 104 pages, Cloth
"[This book is] asking difficult questions instead of dancing a post-postmodern dance. . . . It's an important book."
—Adam Zagajewski
The
Captain Asks for a Show of Hands is Nick Flynn’s first new
poetry collection in nearly a decade. What begins as a meditation on love and
the body soon breaks down into a collage of voices culled from media reports,
childhood memories, testimonies from Abu Ghraib detainees, passages from
documentary films, overheard conversations, and scraps of poems and song, only
to reassemble with a gathering force and lyric urgency. It’s as if all the
noise that fills our days were a storm, yet at the center is a quiet place, but
to get there you must first pass through the storm, with eyes wide open,
singing. Each poem becomes a hallucinatory, shifting experience, through jump
cut, sonic persuasion, and deadpan utterance. This is an emotional, resilient
response to one of the essential issues of our day by one of America’s riskiest
and most innovative writers.
“Nick
Flynn has written—in the tradition of poets such as Yeats, Whitman, Neruda,
Bly, and Ginsberg—a book of political lyric poetry. The book contains, as well,
fragile self-transcendence, unself-conscious witness, and the unnoticed heroism
of having done or said something against a world as welcoming and congenial to
evil as ours appears to be right now.”
—Franz Wright, author of Walking
to Martha’s Vineyard (winner of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize)
“Once again, the unstoppable Nick Flynn has flung open a
door we didn’t know existed. Threaded with dark humor and kickass tweaks to the
predictable, The Captain Asks for a Show
of Hands is a biting and sparse revelation, a lyrical narrative that
unfurls to reveal truths that are insistent and vaguely unsettling. ‘...isn’t
it time to admit,’ Flynn asks, ‘we are more machinery than gods / that our
house is more maze than temple?’ Yes, it’s time—and Flynn’s deft, blade-edged
poetics shove us toward many such insights, with a signature he has defined as
solely his own.”
“I’ve been
waiting for this book for several years now. In fact, I’ve often argued the
need for writers to pick up the pen with this subject in mind. Still—how much
easier it is to look away. To not face our own complicity. Our own culpable
part within the larger historical whole. Thankfully, in The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands, Nick Flynn chooses not to
turn away. Instead, he brings us a poetry which serves as a witness to torture.
It is a necessary investigation into our shared humanity and into the
depravations which undermine it. And while it’s true that to enter this book is
to enter into an intimate world of institutionalized pain, the Reader will also
discover in these pages that the “first thing we should do / if we see each other
again is to make / a cage of our bodies—inside we can place / whatever still
shines.”
—Brian Turner, author of Here, Bullet
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