Entre chien et loup - between dog and wolf. This French colloquialism for twilight informs Jennifer Grotz"s debut poetry collection, Cusp. A winner of this year"s Bakeless Prize for poetry, Grotz explores the peculiar territory of middleness - neither dark nor light, not quite familiar but not fully unknown. It is a place with its own dangers, its own knowledge: road signs in a French tunnel remind drivers of their headlights in the temporary darkness; a scratchy recording of the last castrato highlights art"s uneasy coupling of inspiration and artifice. Personal, thoughtful, inquisitive, and introspective, these poems reveal Grotz"s varied influences, from the "quilted fields" of west Texas to a jazz club in Paris, from a sexy rodeo rider to Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It is the dizziness of the foreign and the strangeness of what"s all around that gives Cusp its energy, its vitality, signaling the arrival of a distinctive new voice in American verse.

Jennifer Grotz’s poems have appeared in Tri-Quarterly, Ploughshares, Black Warrior Review, New England Review, Best American Poetry 2000, and elsewhere. She is currently pursuing the PhD in literature and creative writing at the University of Houston. She received her MFA in poetry and MA in english at Indiana University in 1996, and completed her BA at Tulane University in 1993. She has received grants and scholarships from the Oregon Arts Commission, Literary Arts Inc., the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the National Society of Arts and Letters. She is also the author of Not Body, a limited edition letterpress chapbook, published in 2001 by Urban Editions.

Foreword	p. ix
Between Two Road Signs in Northern Territory	p. 3
The Floating World	p. 4
The Last Living Castrato	p. 6
Map to Light You Can Call Blue	p. 7
Fish	p. 8
Virginity	p. 10
Glimpse	p. 11
Ceramics	p. 12
First Glasses	p. 14
Alizarin Crimson	p. 16
The Waves	p. 17
Try	p. 21
Le Bel Été	p. 22
The Ladder	p. 23
Not This Raw Fluttering	p. 24
Lust	p. 25
Last of the Imperials	p. 27
Tarantismus	p. 28
Unknown	p. 30
Joshua Bell to His Violin	p. 31
Kiss of Judas	p. 32
Self-Portrait as a Drowned Man	p. 35
Waiting to Wake Up Française	p. 37
Dear John Bunyan	p. 39
Jazz in Paris	p. 41
Boulevard Slick with Rain	p. 43
Arrival in Rome	p. 45
The Train	p. 51
Summary	p. 52
Cusp	p. 53
Self-Portrait as Annunciation	p. 54
The Wolf	p. 56
The Train, 2	p. 57
Mind of Winter	p. 58
Inevitable	p. 59
Elegy	p. 60
Between Dog and Wolf	p. 62
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Between Two Road Signs in Northern TerritoryAllumez vos phares the road sign warns as I enter the tunnel, where nighttimerobs the day, speeding nighttime. A kilometer later a sign will remind meVos phares? but for this instant, litter scrapes and flutters across the ground and I am thinking of the exit into daylight,it fools me every time, sunlight a harsher seduction than the gleaming eyes of cars rippling behind.Overhead lights stream geometric shadows that could be pines. In the center of the tunnelwhere entrance disappears, I have no choice. The story is the same backward and forwardso the story is not the point. And the tunnel whispers go down, it whirs and hums. It is the projector's hiss,the seat that reclines. I drive deep into the now of the tunnel: after the light behind recedesmy dashboard glows, intricate, boxed in glass. I dare not interrupt, I spend my fire . . .The Floating WorldThe huge quick bursts of light grow like time lapse photography and dissolve into darkness and embers trailing into black water.I will find you here, sudden as fireworks blooming above the river, the light rail blurring through the empty street,past the grand hotels along the waterfront, where you stand momentarily breathless amid brass and thick carpet, I know this,while bellboys rake the vast ashtrays, stamping the hotel insignia on white sand. Amid the corrosive rain of fireworks, I wonder who would ever leave you.Who could bear to bloom and fade from you? Earlier in sunlight we found a demolished building between two skyscrapers.A boom truck, yellow and toy-like, balanced on the collapsed floors, everything coated with the fine pink dust of crumbled brick. I know an anchormust be here, amid the world floating with all its lights and teases, the carnival spread out like a strip mall along the river, the highwaysforming concrete orbits, tracing the many paths we've taken to arrive. The parking lot off Burnside fills with the Japanese woodblock of the King of Hellsurrounded by his Attendants. The anxiousness of people waiting for the bus. Finding now is the cult of the floating world, but now we are so poisonedand drowsy from perfume and fear. Even my body behaves like a question increasingly impatient at no answer. I am the firefly catcher in the woodblockwhere my mistress in her starry robe holds a fan and paper lantern with two crooked pinkies as I lunge for the veined night skywith hand raised to graspmoonlight's clichd now at the haloed black insects, five of them lazily floating.The Last Living CastratoDifficult to believe, a knife ensures the voice, soprano notes proceed intact while chest hair and beard accompany the new lower octaves, the voice expandingbeyond sex, limited only by lung. And now whole operas composed for castrati are abstract and unperformable, now whole species of off-humans whowere sacrificed for air, for air sinking and rising in their throats, are extinct, now facsimiles reproduce for our ears what is digital mastery,bleeding soprano and countertenor. Except for the brief miracle of Edison's recording: the last living castrato's voice brimming throughstatic and hiss. Technology at its beginning and old-school opera at its decline, that cusp between where a voice spanning five octaves sangto give us proof of the voice, and of how we doctored it to make it more whole, to widen emotion's aperture. He held itin his mouth. Audiences would beg for the aria to be sung over and over, interrupting the story, which was onlyan excuse for the voice. The voice is how, rising, rising, so as to dive, and he held it in his mouth releasingour cruel sacrifice, our gratitude to hear it fall, driven to where the voice takes us: silence, applause.Map to Light You Can Call BlueWhere crows gather in military V's to stitch the unhealable wound of sky. They spiral into Lake Ransom Canyon before dusk, their cries echoing on caliche, abandon. Start here, where fields of cotton mop the caprock dust that released at your birth.The oily road leads you to wildflower graves, then back to this dust suspended in the sunset at your feet. Will this much dust be miraculous, splintered earth in air? When it settles, wipe it off the car hood as if this weren't Texan desert but what will seem impossible, what will never stop astonishing.Spangled. Purple. Ruined. I want the words to get me back to you. The crows ruin my entrance. They sing their spangled ohhhs until the purple night makes foamy ash of you. Because I cannot stop you, I let the sunset envelop you.But now the desert and the canyon are lunar surfaces, and you are unforgivable. When will you turn suspicious? New one, is it enough to love the alien land and not to know later you will love a man this way, grasp his arm as terribly as this terrain resists gathering you up?FishLeaves in Lubbock curl into dark hands, fall into yellow grass, but the desert reasserts itself every season. Because October is not the time of dying, because everything is tentative planted in dust, flat land packs itself tighter. Where the most alien thing to imagine is water roaring underground through the pumps of the Ogalalla Aquifer, a sky turns powdery and bright.Under this light we huddled at the pond by the concrete underpass with muddy string and carrots to lure crawfish. Unpredictable, unaware of season, the minnows darted, changed direction like the roaches swimming across sugar packets in the hatchback parked next door stuffed completely except for the driver's seat with trash. A lake of old cereal boxes and junk mail, crusty towels and fast-food cups pressed against the windows.I have defined my landscape by its shapes, the family car's four doors ajar in the driveway like a cruel piece of farm machinery, or my friend who listens to Mahler with long pieces of stiff paper he folds up or down to make a skyline for each symphony. But what of a fish in water, more abstract than music, yes, soundless until caught, then frantic and vowel-like?What of its ceaseless starebut I must stop because the fish belongs where it is supple and limbless. Biologists argue over what makes a school: two or three or as many as form a three-dimensional shape. In fall, the dying fits in: I picture the pond dribbling into the packed mud and grassy edge. The hatchback holds this shape, and shape is this tentative it has gaps and tiny spaces, never filled while the fish is smothered in water, its skeleton flimsy as plastic price tags, and that is terrifying, or am I looking all wrong?Copyright 2003 by Jennifer Grotz. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.

Excerpted from Cusp: Poems by Jennifer Grotz
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