Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    The Radio
    The Radio
    The Radio
    Ebook75 pages37 minutes

    The Radio

    By Leontia Flynn

    4/5

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    In The Radio, Leontia Flynn exercises her signature wit, formal inventiveness, bitter irony, and unique blend of vernacular speech and literary allusion. In the title poem, the radio is a portal from the outside world, piping "explosive news" of the Northern Irish Troubles into the poet's childhood home, her mother constantly turning to "field the blow" from her children's ears. The first two sections, "The Child, the Family" followed by "And the Outside World," are titled after the classic book on child development by D.W. Winnicott. These poems relentlessly test the boundaries of home and family life as the poet remembers childhood scenes, mentors such as Seamus Heaney, old loves and friends, and the heightened moments of the past. The final section contains three dialogues: a low-flying strafe across the fields of gender politics; a climate change debate between a defender of the industrial abuse of nature for the good of man and the responding voice of nature itself; and a satire writ between a weary mother of grown children and the Awesome Voice of the Internet. This is a volume about transmissions that sometimes assault us and sometimes help us escape, signals breaking through from outside in, from past to present, from parents to children. As the "glazed God's-eye / of the transmitter" keeps watch over home, the city, and the "fanciful list" of people who inhabit these spaces, we are made aware, and made wary, of the constant intrusion of technology and the broader concerns of the world. These formally inventive and superbly controlled poems balance Flynn's trenchant observations with a deeply sympathetic understanding of her subject.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWake Forest University Press
    Release dateOct 1, 2018
    ISBN9781943666195
    The Radio

    Related to The Radio

    Related ebooks

    Poetry For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Three Poems

      Jan 1, 2022

      I’ve seen enough films where a character nickshimself shaving or maybe has a bread knife slip and the thinrun of blood is supposed to stand for some violence,for something he did and is desperateto cover up, but the truth will out—I’ve seen enough th

      2 min read

    • Article

      Six Sonnets

      Jan 1, 2021

      Goldenrod, I could say, you know, everybody wants somethingfrom me, but, well, everybody wants something and nobody wantsnothing from me, goldenrod, towhead, beast. Goldenrod, you packthe meadows like gold-plated sardines. I have heart palpitationsbu

      3 min read

    • Article

      Devil Asks Why You Would Mouth The Word Pity

      Jul 1, 2022

      even in this abundance of dark? Even in this abundance of dark you have totake the stars on faith. Look: Under today’s dim sky there is a basket.In that basket there is a fish. Come night, you are the animal that will eat the best parts of it. And ye

      1 min read

    • Article

      Five Poems

      Nov 1, 2020

      He kept me through childhood.There was a reasonhe kept me from sin like a biscuitwarming in the oven.It’s okay I tell the rain to keep him a theorybut bring him downonce in a while.It’s okay to be honest or selfishbut find the spot where you sinka li

      2 min read

    • Article

      Five Poems

      Mar 1, 2022

      Five Poems
      5 min read

    • Article

      Two Poems

      Jan 1, 2022

      Two Poems
      2 min read

    • Article

      Ishion Hutchinson

      Jun 8, 2021

      Tremor in his hands. He turns obsoleteleaves edged with thunder since the opening scene.What he sees he reads under croton shade,out in the sun. Restless peninsula,dog-eared, melting off into the blue.The blue breaks white as hallucination,more hagga

      3 min read

    • Article

      Must-Read Poetry: November 2020

      Nov 5, 2020

      Stop obsessively refreshing the New York Times's elections page, and check out these new books of poetry by Alice Quinn, Margaret Atwood, Yi Lei, Karina Borowicz, Valzhyna Mort, and Paul Celan. The post Must-Read Poetry: November 2020 appeared first

      6 min read

    • Article

      Younger Than War

      Nov 9, 2023

      Younger Than War
      1 min read

    • Article

      Five Poems

      Nov 1, 2018

      Moon river, swollen river, river of starholeand bright, harness river, lichen river,river we velvet with our filth.River of butter and river of witches, rivercracked open careful like egg, or burstapart, unleashing its violet load.River mouths, river

      2 min read

    • Article

      Harold Bloom, 1930–2019

      Oct 15, 2019

      Harold Bloom, 1930–2019
      1 min read

    • Article

      Eight Poems

      Sep 1, 2021

      The rain is splashy.The baby is fat as apat of butter.Mother is sleeping.No one is crying.Because it was timeto live with strangersbaby was born.Hearing the rainjumping in puddleshe feels another eventis due in time.Not knowing what,not guessing what

      2 min read

    • Article

      Two Poems by Jesse Nathan

      Jun 8, 2021

      Young gray cat puddled under the boxwood,Only the eyes alert. Appressed to dirt. That hissThe hiss of the grasses hissing What shouldWhat should. Blank road shimmers. On days like this,My mind, you hardlySeem to be.On days like these. No, no. See tha

      1 min read

    • Article

      Seven Poems

      Sep 1, 2021

      The dancersIn a terribly brightLight blue gauzeRetained the mystery Skating on a lakeBlue and iceAn illusionary timeWhere poetry feels inevitable The terrific clownWho lies insideEvery blue dressDoes he see me Always a starAlways a rootHorrible auras

      2 min read

    • Article

      Must-Read Poetry: September 2019

      Sep 5, 2019

      Eight new and notable collections you want on your nightstand this month, including work by a lost Catalan master and the latest from our new poet laureate. The post Must-Read Poetry: September 2019 appeared first on The Millions.

      7 min read

    • Article

      Two Poems

      May 1, 2023

      At the end of the world, I sat in the dark waiting for you,but you didn’t come. You didn’t save me. At the end we are always alone, candles slowlyburning out, losing the flame for lack of oxygen. You didn’t tell me it would be like this. All of itcam

      2 min read

    • Article

      A Mournful Spring

      Mar 1, 2022

      in memory of Adam Zagajewski So many friends have you seen pass,maestro of the poetic eulogy. Now it’s my turn. Can you hear me?We don’t know. Why didn’t we spend more time together,talk more, call each other? I thought you’d live to be old,very ol

      1 min read

    • Article

      Three Poems

      Jul 1, 2020

      She was a security guard and even though her uniform was black I could seeIt was covered in blood, the marble floor was covered in blood, it wasSlowly pooling out from the space where HER HAND used to beOh my god, I said, then I started to say, YOUR

      3 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for The Radio

    4/5

    1 rating0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      The Radio - Leontia Flynn

      Loss

      First North American edition

      Copyright © Leontia Flynn, 2018

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without prior permission in writing from the publishers. For permission, write to:

      Wake Forest University Press

      Post Office Box 7333

      Winston-Salem, NC 27109

      wfupress.wfu.edu

      wfupress@wfu.edu

      ISBN 978-1-930630-84-0 (paperback)

      ISBN 978-1-943666-19-5 (epub)

      Library of Congress Control Number: 2017953965

      Cover design by Quemadura

      Publication of this book was generously supported by the Boyle Family Fund.

      … there is a music of words which is beyond

      speech; it is an enduring echo of we know

      not what in the past and in the abyss

      EDWARD THOMAS

      The Child, the Family…

      In the Beginning

      When we had learned that Darwin wrapped his trunk

      in ice-cold towels, that Coleridge’s inflamed

      humours would slink about his drug-racked form,

      we were, like, ‘woah’. Our bullshit was reframed

      as cogent suffering, and a martyrdom,

      noble and true, took shape, extending from

      the maladies that lately harrow us

      —who’re bloated, cramped, hungover, migrainous—

      back through the Mists of Time to some first cause:

      a kind of lady-spider’s bridge-line spun

      out from some far-off, not-remembered room

      that splits and divides to hold as it unwinds

                  the spectre of our fragile human flesh

      trembling on the tensed webs of our minds.

      Yellow Lullaby

      My mother wore a yellow dress…

      —Louis MacNeice

      A spill of sunlight and a yellow dress.

      A yolk.

                  A yellow flower.

                                          A candle flame.

      A moth-light, moon-like, in the nursery’s darkness…

      Every time my daughter cried, I came

      barreling out like some semi-deranged

      trainee barista: friendly but perplexed,

      and in the dark of night, Lo! I was there,

      perplexed—and ratty—when she cried again.

      And thereafter on each new occasion that she cried:

      the form, the limb that moved, the light that shone,

                  the hand that soothed her and the flesh that fed.

      The voice-that-wasn’t-silence that replied,

      there in the night—so she was not alone.

      Not talking, I mean, with the unborn and the dead.

      Alzheimer’s Villanelle

      The human brain is a web of a hundred billion neurons, maybe as many as two hundred billion, with trillions of axons and dendrites exchanging quadrillions of messages by way of at least fifty different chemical transmitters. The organ with which we observe and make sense of the universe is, by a comfortable margin, the most complex object we know of in that universe.

      And yet it is also a lump of meat … I wish he’d had a heart attack instead.

      —Jonathan Franzen, ‘My Father’s Brain’, How to be Alone

      ‘I wish he’d had a heart attack instead’,

      Jonathan Franzen wrote about his father,

      of the slow, quick-slow disease that left him dead.

      ‘After they

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1