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This Is Not a Skyscraper examines New York City through a surrealist lens. Like the title of Magritte’s painting, “This is not a pipe,” these poems question perceptions of the metropolis. While NYC entices talents that swarm its stages, museums, runways, and readings, throngs of outsiders live on the city’s margins, silenced. Among the grotesqueries of corruption, an African immigrant is killed by police in a case of mistaken identity. His disembodied voice introduces the book. Many of these poems attempt to speak for the “others” existing on the peripheral, whose perspectives have been abandoned.
Price: $18.95
Pages: 144
Publisher: Red Hen Press
Imprint: Red Hen Press
Publication Date:
09 April 2015
Trim Size: 9.00 X 6.00 in
ISBN: 9781597094160
Format: Paperback
Most of his poems are also lyrical, with striking imagery. Here is a poignant description of a Coney Island sideshow performer in the beginning lines of “Scorpion Cowboy,” from This is Not a Skyscraper.
How does he tend to the body’s needs? Clunk! His pincers thud like sand-filled shoes. Making his mother’s body bleed
when he was a boy, he swore he’d mask his thalidomide shame like a bruise.
-Sharon Olinka