Red Sky Café: (Salt Modern Poets)

Postcards and poem-cards, a fistful of sonnets, a cento stitched out of forgotten poems and a lipogram on cosmology, a Greek myth retold by its regretful hero and a number of unwritten novels synopsized, a dance number from a lost Betty Grable musical, a very small opera and the catalogue description of a painting best not looked at, the text for a funerary rite, a silent cowboy picture verbalized, interpretive extrapolations of an old engraving and of frames from the "Nibelungen" of Fritz Lang: these might be the wall-hangings for an open-roofed taverna on the outskirts of an eroding cityscape, where the sounds of distant bombardments occasionally filter through the floor show's synthesized flute music. "Red Sky Cafe" is a mix of songs, narrative episodes, previews of coming attractions, and memorabilia of abandoned alleys, loft spaces, and television programs glimpsed in distorted form through the window of a neighbor's apartment.The intercepts transcribed are not devoid of static and are occasionally interrupted by ambient laughter and crowd noises, not to mention the odd and invariably distressing newscast: with special guest appearances by Medusa, Catullus, Clinton prosecutor Kenneth Starr, and a complement of jungle moon men. "Red Sky Cafe" collects poems from the last decade, many of which appeared previously in such places as "Hambone", "Fence", "Conjunctions", "Open City", and "The Germ".

Table of Contents:
Part I At the Bottom of the Island The Dice Players From an Old Engraving La Menteuse Aubade Aubade 2 Techniques of Mass Persuasion Part II Prospectus Funerary Parade From the Old Age of Perseus Intercept Choral Fragments Part III Poem-Cards for the Red Sky Café Part IV A Set of Postcards Roof Garden Youth Culture Children’s Games I Children’s Games II Black Mirror The Bus Liner Note Insomnia Little Opera Standards Up In the Old Loft Guys The Payback House Detective Part V Letty Lane’s Wedding Day Girls on Probation Apartment 33 Jungle Moon Men Robinson’s Nephew Landscape: “The Forest” Impressions: 1929 The Platform Sutra of Betty Grable Part VI Ground Speech (after Fritz Lang) Four Reels, Believed Lost The Green Lady A Song Strung Out At Its Limit A Coda

About the Author :
Geoffrey O’Brien was born in New York City. His poetry has been collected previously in A Book of Maps, The Hudson Mystery, and Floating City: Selected Poems 1978-1995. He is also the author of a number of prose works including Hardboiled America, Dream Time: Chapters from the Sixties, The Phantom Empire, The Browser’s Ecstasy, and Castaways of the Image Planet. He is editor-in-chief of The Library of America.