The gardens of our childhoods /

The gardens of our childhoods /

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Bibliographic Details
Author / Creator:Belk, John, author.
Imprint:Pittsburgh, PA : Autumn House Press, [2022]
©2022
Description:63 pages ; 22 cm
Language:English
Subject:
Wrestling -- Poetry.
American poetry -- 21st century.
American poetry.
Wrestling.
Poetry
poetry.
Poetry.
Poetry.
Format: Print Book
URL for this record:http://pi.lib.uchicago.edu/1001/cat/bib/12729153
Hidden Bibliographic Details
ISBN:163768035X
9781637680353
Summary:"Poems considering self, masculinity, and culture through the spectacle of professional wrestling. In this stunning debut, John Belk looks at the world of professional wrestling to excavate the real within the artificial and explore the projections we create, run from, and delight in. In The Gardens of Our Childhoods, the distance between spectacle and reality blurs. Belk uses the spectacle of wrestling to stare deeply into American culture and masculinity, parsing the intersecting threads of patriarchy and gender, and unpacking identity formation and performance. As Belk pries into toxic masculinities, he leaves space also for tenderness, queerness, and resistance to normative structures, opening the potential for love and admiration. Populated by classic and contemporary wrestlers like André the Giant, Hulk Hogan, "Stone Cold" Steve Austin, Ricky Steamboat, Bruno Sammartino, Marcus "Buff" Bagwell, and more, this book is ultimately about the constant deconstruction and reconstruction of our identities that smudge fiction and reality. Like wrestlers in their operatic and winding storylines, we learn how to project and inhabit identities while growing into and fighting against the scripts we write for ourselves and those that are imposed on us. The Gardens of Our Childhoods is the winner of Autumn House Press's Rising Writer Prize in Poetry."--
Awards:"Winner of the 2021 Autumn House Rising Writer Prize"--Cover
Table of Contents:
  • Trash
  • Perry Saturn makes ends meet after a failed tour with New Japan Pro-Wrestling
  • The Death of Owen Hart
  • Buff Bagwell's Mother
  • Incantation [Fraxinus ornus]
  • Perry Saturn fell in love with a mop
  • The Cauliflower Alley Club
  • Stasiak & Sammartino
  • Stasiak & Sammartino II
  • The Gardens of Our Childhoods
  • Marcus Bagwell's Mother
  • Letterlocking
  • Angle of Regard
  • A business without heart or conscience
  • Hermeneutics
  • Bar trivia: good things have to happen to someone
  • WrestleMania XVI & suicide
  • Stone Cold Steve Austin's Mother
  • Definition of the continental shelf
  • The Undertaker's American Badass Phase
  • Dead letter office
  • Bar trivia: no wrestler has ever used an Annie Lennox song as entry music
  • Jimmy Snuka's Mother
  • John Cena's Spinner Belt
  • Poem about a dying mall
  • Perry Saturn at a bed-&-breakfast in Katonah, New York, before a January sunrise
  • My love wants a chicken named Eleanor of Aquitaine
  • Razor Ramon
  • Blackjack Mulligan's Mother
  • The time Vince McMahon tore both his quadriceps while sliding angrily
  • Shipletters
  • Madison Square
  • Hacksaw Jim Duggan's Mother
  • The Fingerpoke of Doom
  • One two skip a few a hundred
  • Bar trivia: Venice has been sinking for years
  • Perry Saturn wonders
  • Good Endings
  • Ultimate Warrior's Mother
  • Fanletters
  • For once the best option is the easiest option
  • The Mouth of the South
  • Perry Saturn becomes the first wrestler to board the International Space Station
  • At the top of this space elevator
  • The young immortal plane
  • Olive Saturn & the Third Plutonian Resettlement Operation
  • The Fancy
  • Acknowledgments
  • Thanks
The May Friend Goodman Book Collection Established by her husband Rabbi Abram Vossen Goodman bookplate

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