Publisher Description

Triptych disrupts conventions of book authorship. Between two covers are three books, The Three-Legged World by Peter Grandbois, In Time by James McCorkle, and Orpheus & Echo by Robert Miltner. Of course, books converse with other books, and poetry, rippling from unmeasured sound into rampant forms, is especially polyphonic. Etruscan brings these three books together because they exerted upon our editors a gravitational pull, causing the shadow of one to fall across the reading of another. Sufficient on their own, these books achieve new altitudes when aligned. Triptych launches no school. It backs no cause. What these books share is not easily labeled. None follows narrative conventions. None dwells on confession. None abides predictable meter. None is easily parsed. Each climbs eerie heights where ego finds no purchase. Each takes a kaleidoscopic view of selfhood. Each takes flight toward apotheosis. Each blesses the moments "Before we turn into air," or give way to "tongue of trees, language of clouds," and before "Gods and dogs begin their talking back," before birds "are falling through their late bodies." In Miltner's ogham-deep caesuras, in McCorkle's speech-song, and in Grandbois's cadences which whisper like ghostly passersby, "sound is emanation," and emanation asks, "what would this line be without the words?"

Author Biography

Peter Grandbois is the author of nine previous books, the most recent of which is half-burnt (Spuyten Duyvil, 2019). His poems, stories, and essays have appeared in over one hundred journals. His plays have been performed in St. Louis, Columbus, Los Angeles, and New York. He is a senior editor at Boulevard magazine and teaches at Denison University in Ohio. You can find him at Born in St. Petersburg, Florida, James McCorkle is the author of Evidences (selected by Jorie Graham for the 2003 APR-Honickman First Book Award) and The Subtle Bodies (Etruscan Press 2014). He received an M.F.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Iowa and is a recipient of fellowships from Ingram Merrill and the NEA, he teaches at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York. Robert Miltner's prose poetry collection is Hotel Utopia (New Rivers Press), winner of the Many Voices Project poetry prize; his prose poetry chapbooks include Against the Simple (Kent State University Press), winner of a Wick Chapbook award, and Eurydice Rising (Red Berry Editions), winner of the Summer Chapbook award; his book of brief fiction is And Your Bird Can Sing (Bottom Dog Press). A recipient of an Ohio Arts Council award in poetry, he has been a finalist for the National Poetry Series, the Louise Bogan Award for Artistic Merit and Excellence, and the New York Center for the Book chapbook prize. An Emeritus Professor of English at Kent State University and the Northeast Ohio MFA in Creative Writing (NEOMFA), Miltner edits The Raymond Carver Review. He lives in the historic Vassar Park neighborhood in Canton, Ohio, with his wife, the writer Molly Fuller.

Table of Contents

THE THREE-LEGGED WORLD Peter Grandbois I There is no one to write this 21 [Sometimes when I wake] 22 [Sometimes I think I hear] 23 All that can be heard 24 [Sometimes when I look at myself I see] 26 There are no secret lives 27 As if darkness doesn''t come drop by drop 28 Calling us back 29 That we do not perish 31 Now begins the silent season 32 [When the body forgets] 33 The breaking of tongues 34 Something like faith 35 [All we know of stone] 36 Here is the river here is the dream 37 What mud-drunk song waits 38 A long way back 39 Someone not 40 [This winter bone-house] 42 Here is the watery grave 43 Three January Sonnets 44 II [Why not this other dream] 49 Someone lit my memory on fire 50 The bridge 51 [My body haunts itself] 52 [My body faded like a shadow] 53 [Hollowness seeps in when I wake] 54 [The universe is like a corpse] 55 The doctor said he was fine 56 The ballet of the broken 57 Sometimes I''m not sure what memory is worth 58 To the one who no longer walks these streets 59 The veil between worlds is thin 60 The alchemist is thinking of his secrets 61 III To return to things their stillness 65 Only in the dark 66 This mad dance 67 Sometimes I want to ask 68 A prayer to fall like dust in search of a home 69 The way we push through light 70 The color of hands 72 What the night has to say 73 The way sky moves 74 Waiting for revelation 75 Say it is the world 76 Rain 77 [How am I only] 78 So close to steam over a river 79 What pulls toward clearing 80 Light water beneath the dark 81 [Maybe only without] 82 Sleep 83 The sacrifice of things hurts at first 85 Here is where it ends 86 IN TIME James McCorkle The Visible World 91 Drift-Lines 93 May Days 95 Azulitos 98 Measures 100 Summer Solstice 102 Peonies 105 Cicada 107 Falling Birds 109 September Notes 114 Hornets 116 The Saffron Gatherer 117 Fox Sparrow 120 ====== 124 The Water Column 125 Fire Regime 130 Anthracite 134 Euphrates 138 ====== 146 Dog Fox 147 On Recollection 148 February Journal 149 Owling 150 Thule 152 Barn Fire 154 Source Code 159 Updraft 160 Fusillade 161 May''s Velocities 163 House Crickets 164 In Time 166 May Suspensions 167 Kill Holes 168 Notes 172 ORPHEUS & ECHO Robert Miltner Orpheus: invocation to the muses 177 I island apple trees in bloom 181 Eurydice: symphony in green & gold 182 water lilies 183 coincidence of distance 184 idleness & indolence[love song] 185 shore line: epistle to Eurydice 186 portrait of Eurydice as a charcoal sketch 187 coincidence of direction 188 adrift: a draft 189 Eurydice rising 190 epithalamium [dream song] 191 alchemy calling 192 Eurydice waiting 193 three gossips: ballads for a blue guitar 194 II studio studio session [sound check] 197 summer''s ending [song] 198 snow at Louveciennes & rain in Arles [song] 199 Eurydice: coincidence of remembrance [dream song] 200 Cupid & Psyche [love song] 201 Paris: ghost of a chance [unrequited love song] 202 green door [tone poem] 203 painting the town wine [cover song] 204 Narcissus Boulevard[selfie video with soundtrack] 205 clatter of jackdaws: Eurydice as sorry sight [alternate take] 206 portrait of Eurydice as theater & thespian [dream song] 207 number ten [fantasy] 208 portrait of Echo as Camille Monet in a red cape [song] 209 lost at sea: Hart''s song 210 satyr rock [bootleg] 211 Orpheus: photo booth [fantasy] 212 III underworld blue islands 215 Orpheus: a ruin of willows 216 black nasturtium 217 autumn peninsula 218 Narcissus: the day I drowned 219 Echo to Narcissus [dream missive] 220 sugar & salt 221 the river Nox & the caves of Hypnos [fantasy] 222 alackaday the winter orchard 223 scatter my heart you three-sistered muse 224 Morpheus: changeling in the looking-glass 225 mockingbird [blues jam] 226 Orpheus in Vegas [dream song] 227 Orpheus: once a traveler 228 Echo: coda & envoi [found song] 229 notes 230

Review

Poetry's roots lie in the communal. The first sceops, or shapers of words, recited their poems to an audience gathered about the fire, and later the mead hall, one poet beginning where the previous ended. Only recently has poetry shifted to an isolated activity written by a solitary writer and read by a lone reader. Hwaet! The communal origins of poetry have returned in Triptych! What a great joy to share this space with two poets whose mythological hauntings and metaphysical musings dance so tantalizingly with my own. Buy a book. Take a seat, and welcome back to the hearth! --Peter Grandbois In these three distinct, discrete, and demanding collections within a single cover, what connects them all is the attention to the celebrant's voice. If poetry is anything it is the pleasure of the poet in their language--whatever the poem may mean is ancillary to the velocities of language, the inhabitations that language creates, formal or densely scattering, historical or local. Each of these collections off er readers a dwelling in language, the extension of voice across poems and into poetry-making / poiesis / formations. These are individual formations and velocities, yet as the collections become proximate, they are near to each other, sharing the pleasures of this work, this in/forming. --James McCorkle The poets in Triptych are experimenting with poetry's innovative possibilities and unexpected potential. Peter Grandbois' The Three-Legged World offers lyric meditations on stance, speech, and sonority. James McCorkle's In Time computer code-like lines explore the relationship between breath and line breaks. Robert Miltner's Orpheus & Echo evokes fragments of lost texts that straddle the intimate distance between the prosaic and the poetic. Reading Triptych, a unique three-books-in-one collection, is like attending a seminar on twenty-first century poetics. --Robert Miltner

Review Quote

What a sensual delight! What a brilliant, provocative, lyrical read! Surprising, unique, witty, insightful, Orpheus & Echo is like slipping into a mythical world, a visual paradise, a fractured dream. It's like a glass of the rarest wine--perhaps mixed with a hallucinogen or two. A rare and original collection in which each poem possesses mystical moments, insights, visions, shimmering gems, this is the kind of book you will want to keep on your nightstand and read slowly, just to feel how poetry can change not only how you see the world, but also how you think, walk, breathe. In Orpheus & Echo, Miltner has composed what most poets only dream of--a poetry collection that can change your life. --Nin Andrews, The Book of Orgasms and Why God is a WomanRobert Miltner describes the prose poems in Orpheus & Echo as "ekphrastic pieces based on the work of French and American Impressionist painters." This of course is true, since Impressionism, for all of its dependency on what Baudelaire calls the "lyrical impulses of the soul," still relies on the writer's or artist's impressions of external reality, as many of these prose poems do. And yet, Miltner's collection owes more to improvisation, to his ability to move effortlessly between the classical and contemporary, between the sacred and the profane, yet his work is capable at any moment of cutting loose. Only a mature poet could have written Orpheus & Echo, with it perfect mixture of classical, Romantic, and contemporary impulses. --Peter Johnson, Rants and Raves: Selected and New Prose PoemsReading Orpheus & Echo by Robert Miltner is like strolling through a gallery of Impressionist paintings while listening to the voices of oboes, cellos, and mourning doves remixed into a soundtrack of loss. His gorgeous music is made of lush, precise images, and phrases that transform themselves into stunning riffs through repetition and variation. White space expands inside his prose poems like breath, and yet after reading this, I still felt slightly breathless, awed by Miltner's vision and accomplishment, and wistful, like I'd just woken from a bittersweet dream. --Kathleen McGookey, Heart in a Jar and Whatever Shines

Description for Sales People

Peter Grandbois' The Three-Legged World is a poetry collection that is a paean to the many selves that can haunt us. The idea for the book germinated as he read Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet . Pessoa's memoir is really an anti-memoir, and that notion inspired the collection of poems which can be seen as anti-poems, in that they unravel Keats' negative capability until we are left with nothing. The poems in James McCorkle's In Time fuse political/ecological/attentiveness with extended forms of the lyric poem. Each poem has its own source point; but as a whole, he gathered the poems with a sense of the visual, a sense of the topographies of landscapes and languages. Robert Miltner's Orpheus & Echo is a collection of prose poetry that uses a pop culture approach to the Orpheus myth to explore issues of loss and recovery on a personal and artistic level. The fragmented narrative time travels between the historical Greek island of Samothrace and contemporary world cities (Paris, Las Vegas) and a recording studio where Orpheus and his back-up band member, Echo, record an album of songpoems called "Torn Apart by Love."

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