The poems in Dobby Gibson’s new book transform the everyday into the revelatory
Little Glass Planet
Poems
Can it be true
our primary job
here on earth is to wait?
If there really is another world,
maybe all the languages are there too,
still desperate to perform,
sentences full of bright shards,
straining to shorten distances
by opening up staticky channels.
It’s odd we assume whatever is out there
will be able to understand us
any better than we do.
—from “Trace”
our primary job
here on earth is to wait?
If there really is another world,
maybe all the languages are there too,
still desperate to perform,
sentences full of bright shards,
straining to shorten distances
by opening up staticky channels.
It’s odd we assume whatever is out there
will be able to understand us
any better than we do.
—from “Trace”
Little Glass Planet exults in the strangeness of the known and unknowable world. In poems set as far afield as Mumbai and Marfa, Texas, Gibson maps disparate landscapes, both terrestrial and subliminal, to reveal the drama of the quotidian. Aphoristic, allusive, and collaged, these poems mine our various human languages to help us understand what we might mean when we speak to each other—as lovers, as family, as strangers. Little Glass Planet uses lyric broadcast to foreshorten the perceived distances between us, opening borders and pointing toward a sense of collectivity. “This is my love letter to the world,” Gibson writes, “someone call us a sitter. / We’re going to be here a while.”
Elegiac, funny, and candid, Little Glass Planet is a kind of manual for paying attention to a world that is increasingly engineered to distract us from our own humanity. It’s a book that points toward hope, offering the possibilities of a “we” that only the open frequency of poetry can create, possibilities that are indistinguishable from love.
Elegiac, funny, and candid, Little Glass Planet is a kind of manual for paying attention to a world that is increasingly engineered to distract us from our own humanity. It’s a book that points toward hope, offering the possibilities of a “we” that only the open frequency of poetry can create, possibilities that are indistinguishable from love.
$16.00
