American Tensions

by Reichard, William; Kooser, Ted

• ISBN13: 9780981559384
• ISBN10: 0981559387
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2011-04-26
• Publisher: New Village Pr

Summary

An anthology of contemporary American fiction, poetry, and nonfiction that explores issues of oppression, injustice, identity, and social change.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. xiii
Foreword	p. xv
Introduction	p. xvii
The Lives We're Given, The Lives We Make	p. 1
Future Home of the Living God	p. 3
Speaking of Names	p. 18
The Machinist, Teaching His Daughter to Play the Piano	p. 19
Work	p. 20
Keats	p. 23
Shiloh	p. 24
Bastard Out of Carolina (an excerpt)	p. 36
The Root Woman	p. 47
The Smell of Snake	p. 48
Trestle	p. 49
In Winter	p. 51
Straddling Fences	p. 53
At the Galleria	p. 55
Dialectical Materialism	p. 56
The Florist's Daughter (an excerpt)	p. 58
Other Meaning	p. 65
Seven Fragments (found inside my father)	p. 66
Father Outside	p. 67
Good to Go	p. 69
Man On The TV Say	p. 77
Only Everything I Own	p. 77
Inconvenient	p. 78
What To Tweak	p. 79
Golden Rule Days	p. 82
$00/Line/Steel/Train (excerpts)	p. 85
Lessons	p. 88
Lincoln Avenue	p. 89
Resolution	p. 89
Undoing	p. 91
Manikin	p. 92
Avoidance	p. 102
Said to Sarah, Ten	p. 103
Trans	p. 104
Aaron at Work/Rain	p. 105
Hymns to Nanan	p. 106
That Which Holds Us Together, That Which Pulls Us Apart	p. 111
An Atlas of the Difficult World (excerpts)	p. 113
Speaking English Is Like	p. 118
Uses for Spanish in Pittsburgh	p. 119
Grocery Shopping with My Girlfriend Who Is Not Asian	p. 720
Speaking Spanish Is Like	p. 122
Indian Education	p. 123
The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin's Theory (excerpts)	p. 128
Fugue	p. 135
Overture: Watermelon City	p. 137
Observation Post #71	p. 139
Here, Bullet	p. 139
AB Negative	p. 140
Nightin Blue	p. 141
Praise the Tortilla, Praise Menudo, Praise Chorizo	p. 142
The Magnets	p. 143
These Days	p. 145
I Didn't Sleep	p. 146
Bagram, Afghanistan, 2002	p. 147
Messy	p. 148
Poem Post-9/11/01	p. 149
First Generation Angels	p. 150
The Young Asian Women	p. 151
Father Blues for Jon Jang	p. 152
Minneapolis Public	p. 154
Under the Influence	p. 156
Guidelines for the Treatment of Sacred Objects	p. 168
The Theft Outright	p. 170
Butter Maiden and Maize Girl Survive Death Leap	p. 171
The Lone Reader and Tonchee Fistfight in Pages	p. 172
Charlie Howard's Descent	p. 173
Tiara	p. 174
Homo Will Not Inherit	p. 176
Beginners	p. 179
Art Lessons	p. 181
Toward a Portrait of the Undocumented	p. 184
Blasphemous Elegy for May 14, 2003	p. 185
The Rain, the Rez, and Other Things	p. 188
Autobiography of My Alter Ego (excerpts)	p. 199
1959, Loomis Avenue	p. 202
Akhenaten	p. 203
The Glue That Held Everything Together	p. 205
Spirit Car: Journey to a Dakota Past (excerpt)	p. 207
Conjuring War	p. 211
Falling Man	p. 112
But at the Church	p. 213
Polygutteral	p. 214
Burnt Offering: Mid-November	p. 218
Frozen in the Sky	p. 219
The Secret to Life in America	p. 222
The Edge of the World-The Contemporary Environment	p. 225
Culture, Biology, and Emergence	p. 227
Designer Genes	p. 242
So Much Like A Beach After All	p. 252
It Is Fair To Be Crossing	p. 252
Not Getting Tired of the Earth	p. 253
Between Now and Then	p. 254
Lone Tree, 1986	p. 256
continental divide	p. 261
cancer inside the little sea	p. 262
Cloudy Is the Stuff of Stones	p. 264
Humble	p. 267
Rapture	p. 268
The Radiant	p. 269
The Night Constant	p. 270
Waterfront Property	p. 272
Alice & Emily, Diana & Dunes	p. 288
Rights and Permissions	p. 299
Contributors	p. 303
About the Editor	p. 309
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

[Section intro]

Section Two: That Which Holds Us Together, That Which Pulls Us Apart

We each have our own sense of what it means to be American. This sense is derived from a vast and shifting catalog of influences, including cultural and social messaging, the constant pressure of normative behavior, everything we see, hear, and read, prejudices and preferences, and our individual experiences. Everywhere we turn, we’re bombarded by sometimes subtle and oftentimes bombastic messages about what it means to be an American, how to act like an American, how to defend America, and who and who isn’t a “real” American. We all have to contend with constantly competing ideas about what defines the great experiment that is the United States of America. This social and cultural noise can make it difficult to critically reflect on our own experiences, our sense of self, and what shapes our identity. Most of us have, to some extent, multiple identities, and we’re often pulled in several directions at once when someone asks us who we are, what we are, where we’re from. The stories, poems, and prose in this section explore the lives of individuals who find themselves at intersections, places where one sense of self clashes with another, where one individual or group tries to gain control over another. The work here simultaneously defines what it means to be American and defies any easy definition of that label. The United States is a living organism, never at rest, and never the same thing twice. It exists because of the dynamic play between unity and tension. This same sense of tensegrity is what holds up the work in this section, with each piece defining, in moments of clarity, an individual’s sense of an American self, filled with conflict, confidence, and a myriad of unanswered questions.

[Contribution to Section Two]

The Secret to Life in America

by Ed Bok Lee

My brother sits me down and tells me
the secret to life in America.
I’m twelve years old when this happens.
He grabs my shoulders and says:
No one likes an immigrant.
It reminds them of when they fell down
and no one was around to help them.
When they couldn’t talk.
As children when they got lost in public.
Cold and wet, everyone hates an immigrant.

So don’t trust nobody.
The whites, they’ll teach you
to hate yourself for being silent.
They’ll punish you for fighting back.
They’ll love the taste of your food and culture, and sister...
and yet spit you out.

The Blacks, at first you’d think they understand loss.
But to them you’re just another cracker with a bad case of jaundice.
Don’t expect shit from them,
they can’t afford to be generous.
Latins laugh at you behind your back.
Do you know this? I’m trying to tell you
how it is in the city,
he says.

I ask my brother if I can go outside now.

No!, he screams. Our father is dead
and now I have to teach you
how to survive
in America.

Fags are everywhere.
And they want you. ‘Cause
to them you’re exotic and cute
and will do all the dirty work.
The Chinese look down on you
for using their alphabet. The Japanese have raped
your women through the centuries
and will do it again. In fact, never
do business with other Asians,
‘cause they’re the greediest people alive.
Next to Jews.

Now I’m crying, because my brother
has pulled off his work shirt.

Open your eyes!
This is where that black boy pulled the trigger
over twenty dollars and a candy bar! Here
is where the whites punctured my kidney in a parking lot outside of Denny’s
And the Mexicans just kept drinking their beers.
This is the bruise on my soul
where every American girl ever looked at me
like I was still the enemy.
This is where agent orange first set in.
This is where the DMZ line is still drawn!
Taste the barbed wire on my tongue!
See where that fat white teacher called me a freak
for getting a B in math! Feel
my broken immigrant’s throat
that couldn’t tell him to Fuck Off!!!
These are my yellow hands!
This is my cock!
These are my eyes wide open!
This is my heart filled with cigarette smoke!
This my aching back
which brought you here
and buried our father!
This is the cheek mother slapped
for the way that I called her
ignorant.

This is the GQ subscription sister gave me for Christmas.

Here is my blood, which tastes just like tears.
These are my dreams for the future
dead and shriveled in the corner.
This is my broom. This the face
I couldn’t save from myself.
Are you listening to any of this?

Yes, I tell him. I’m listening.

You’re lucky, he says. You’ll go to college
when you grow up.

I don’t know, I tell him.

Work your ass off and move away from this shit hole
out to the suburbs. Maybe marry
a white girl.

I don’t know, I tell him.

Go off and write.... Poetry.

I won’t, I say.

Yes you will. And when you do,
do me this one favor.

What, I ask.

Lie.
And make our father and me

the heroes

you always needed us to be.