Publisher Description

Jay Baron Nicorvo's debut collection revolves around a central character, called Deadbeat-a descendant of John Berryman's Mr. Bones, Marvin Bell's Dead Man and Ted Hughes's Crow, to name an irrepressible few. The poems weave together a domestic narrative as Deadbeat himself muddles through courtship, marriage, divorce, estrangement and, of course, fatherhood. An effigy for America and our culture of recession, Deadbeat is brought to life with honesty, sympathy and love in all of its complications.

Author Biography

Jay Baron Nicorvo lives on an old farm in Michigan with his wife, Thisbe Nissen, their rambunctious son, and a dozen vulnerable chickens.

Table of Contents

I. THE LOVED DEAD * Child Support Hearing * Wish for Mortgage, Taste Glue * Stone * Deadbeat on the Farm with Cow * Ruthless and Brutal, Deadbeat Wants the World * Deadbeat Thrown on the Potter's Wheel, and at Sea * Vigil * A Long, Precarious Walk * At St. Mary's for Old Times' Sake * Before the Engagement, Marriage, Estrangement, and Divorce, There Was Matzo * II. HOUSEBROKEN * Mute Heart, Plum Stone, and Open Ticket * Deadbeat's Recipe for Lamb * Deadbeat Takes a Job in the Service Industry * Withdrawal * Deadbeat in the Drear Immerse * Town with Only One Border * First Weather * Love Poem * Description * Rainshadow * III. THE LIFEGLASS OVERTURNED * Deadbeat on High * Grief * The Sky's Noose, the Sun * Atrophy * Hot Knives * Cosmos Certainly Silly * Mistake the Window for the World * Wrestling Memory in Southern Florida * The Hope for Physical Deformity * Deadbeat Living, Dying * IV. THE LAND OF LOVE-NO-MORE * Deadbeat Revealed as Robert Tools * Colorblind before Katrina * Telemachus to Odysseus * Home is What We Make It * Learning Disability * Paradigm Shift * Response to the Analog Heart * Deadbeat in the Meantime * Into the Undrinkable Atlantic * V. CAJOLE * Over the Big Top, and Under, an Encore * Deadbeat Jr. Rents a Plot in the Victory Gardens * Courting * Head * Deadbeat Haunts a Home He Left * Four Devotions * On the Nightstand * Deadbeat's World Ends with a Whimper * After the Engagement * Struck Dumb * Last Poem

Review

Nicorvo s wry and seriocomic debut presents scenes, symbols, and durable remarks from the life of his titular alter ego, a figure (like Berryman s Henry or Mary Jo Bang s Louise) who both is and is not the author, whose searing and ridiculous misadventures make him sometimes larger and sometimes smaller than life, anyone or everyone, with modern bourgeois problems, unspooling obligations, and a washed-out interior life...Nicorvo, who lives in Michigan, delivers these scenes in free verse with a confident cadence, never prosy but never too far from prose sense. Coherent and memorable in its dry sadness, this sequence may...also grow stranger upon rereading, its meditations on fatherhood, descent, masculinity, and responsibility giving it something that most of those models lack. Publishers Weekly"

Review Quote

"Nicorvo's wry and seriocomic debut presents scenes, symbols, and durable remarks from the life of his titular alter ego, a figure (like Berryman's Henry or Mary Jo Bang's Louise) who both is and is not the author, whose searing and ridiculous misadventures make him sometimes larger and sometimes smaller than life, anyone or everyone, with modern bourgeois problems, unspooling obligations, and a washed-out interior life...Nicorvo, who lives in Michigan, delivers these scenes in free verse with a confident cadence, never prosy but never too far from prose sense. Coherent and memorable in its dry sadness, this sequence may...also grow stranger upon rereading, its meditations on fatherhood, descent, masculinity, and responsibility giving it something that most of those models lack."-Publishers Weekly

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