Pascals's Other Wager, Poems by Rush Rankin
The
suave personae in Rush Rankin's new collection Pascal's Other Wager
examine the world of human relationships with ironic, knowing detachment.
Yet beneath the world-weary tone of these poems is a secret love of the
world and a stubborn resistance to that world's alienating tendencies:
If you love someone
after not
loving her at first when she
loved you, thus breaking
her heart, if you love someone
in body, at first, but not soul,
not character, not the radiant
glint of her eyes, her being,
but then change, and love
the halo of her look, that smile
typical of tired saints, and love
still the turmoil of flesh,
even after breaking her heart...
Praise for Rush Rankin's Earlier Work
"[Rankin's work's] cool manners seem to hold compassion at bay; but its irony is a cleansing discipline which allows it to conjure complex lusts, hurts, and injustices without self-pity and, apparently, without delusion."--Rosanna Warren
"If the long hours in offices of the mind elect for us meaningfulness, they must always eventually find the human heart. Then Rankin's vivid and surprising poems map that movement where as Rilke insists, what is sublime is mundane, and everything that falls must somehow in shadow/act, rise."--Norman Dubie
Rush Rankin's previous books of poetry include Bene-Dictions and The Failure of Grief. His writing has appeared in such journals as The Paris Review and Triquarterly, and his book on aesthetics, In Theory, has just been published. He currently teaches theory and literature at the Kansas City Art Institute.
ISBN: 1933456515, 80 pages, $17.00