{"id":13982,"date":"2011-05-28T01:58:53","date_gmt":"2011-05-28T01:58:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=13982"},"modified":"2015-05-20T23:34:02","modified_gmt":"2015-05-20T23:34:02","slug":"spit-back-a-boy-poems-by-iain-haley-pollock","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=13982","title":{"rendered":"Spit Back a Boy: Poems by Iain Haley Pollock"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong><em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.ugapress.org\/index.php\/books\/spit_back\" target=\"_blank\">Spit Back a Boy: Poems by Iain Haley Pollock<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.ugapress.org\" target=\"_blank\">The University of Georgia Press<\/a><br \/>\n2011-06-15<br \/>\n72 pages<br \/>\nTrim size: 5.5 x 8.5<br \/>\nISBN: 978-0-8203-3908-5<\/p>\n<p><strong><a href=\"http:\/\/iainhaleypollock.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">Iain Haley Pollock<\/a><\/strong>, English Teacher<br \/>\n<em>Springside-Chestnut Hill Academy, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania<\/em><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.ugapress.org\/index.php\/books\/spit_back\" target=\"_blank\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.ugapress.org\/images\/ugapress\/books\/9780820339085.jpg\" alt=\"\" border=\"0\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p><em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.cavecanempoets.org\/pdfs\/Iain_Haley_Pollock_Wins_Cave_Canem_Poetry_Prize.pdf\" target=\"_blank\">Winner of the 2010 The Cave Canem Poetry Prize<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n<p>Iain Haley Pollock\u2019s poems cover the ground from a woman late to catfish supper to an ancient queen who howls, \u201cSea, you is ugly,\u201d from the creaking of slave ships launched from Lancaster to gunfire on a contemporary Philadelphia street. Such lyric moments find grounding in stories woven through this book\u2014in one story line, <strong>a boy with a black mother and white father wishes he could shed his white skin or carve into what lies beneath: \u201cI flung my almost white self \/ into my mother\u2019s embrace\u2014that brown \/ embrace I hoped would swallow me whole \/ and spit back a boy four shades darker.\u201d<\/strong> Another thread follows a marriage and a woman intertwined with hunger and the blues, a woman who hears a whale song in a refrigerator\u2019s hum, who cries hard like the lonely barking of a fox.<\/p>\n<p>Even when these poems soften, they can\u2019t be complacent about good fortune: for all the maple seedpods and snow fluttering down <em>here<\/em>, the poems are always aware of wreckage and car bombs <em>there<\/em>, and they keep conscious of the mustard gas of old wars and the losses of recent ones. Punctuated with lives that end early, such as those of Hart Crane and Mikey Clark, a high-school classmate who once swiped the Communion wine, Pollock\u2019s collection earns its vitality and romance without closing its eyes to violence and sorrow.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>from \u201cRattla cain\u2019t hold me\u201d<\/p>\n<p>. . . And all our sadness will be old Arkansas,<br \/>\nrural and misspoken, its roads smudged<br \/>\nby the fog\u2019s blue prints, its pine board shacks<\/p>\n<p>daubed with mud to keep out mosquitoes<br \/>\nand the cold. The kitchens and porches<br \/>\nwhere we aren\u2019t will cease to exist. We\u2019ll miss<\/p>\n<p>rain in autumn dousing the fire of the leaves.<br \/>\nWind writhing like a water moccasin.<br \/>\nLike convicts we\u2019ll sing, <em>Rattla cain\u2019t hold me<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>Rattla cain\u2019t hold me<\/em>, while outside the fence,<br \/>\npoplars, stripped by gypsy moths, stand bare.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Spit Back a Boy: Poems by Iain Haley Pollock The University of Georgia Press 2011-06-15 72 pages Trim size: 5.5 x 8.5 ISBN: 978-0-8203-3908-5 Iain Haley Pollock, English Teacher Springside-Chestnut Hill Academy, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Winner of the 2010 The Cave Canem Poetry Prize Iain Haley Pollock\u2019s poems cover the ground from a woman late to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,8,1617],"tags":[6445,6444,6446,463],"class_list":["post-13982","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-media-archive","category-poetry-books","tag-iain-h-pollock","tag-iain-haley-pollock","tag-iain-pollock","tag-university-of-georgia-press"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13982","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13982"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13982\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13982"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13982"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13982"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}