Hunting Down the Monk: Poems

by Kusserow, Adrie

• ISBN13: 9781929918232
• ISBN10: 1929918232
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2002-12-01
• Publisher: Boa Editions

Summary

Drawing from her work in comparative religion and cultural anthropology, Adrie Kusserow offers a collection of portraits of Westerners in the East and Easterners in the West struggling to relearn and relive their ideas of culture, religion, and God. These poems expose the human craving for the nourishment of a spiritual life. Celebrated poet Karen Swenson has written the Foreword. Adrie Kusserow received her Ph.D. in social anthropology from Harvard University in 1996 and is currently associate professor of cultural anthropology at St. Michael's College in Vermont. She continues to do cross-cultural field work on the spread of Eastern philosophies to the West.

Table of Contents

Foreword	8	(5)
Karen Swenson
I. NOMADS
Hunting Down the Monk	13	(2)
Picking the Streets, Kathmandu	15	(2)
West Meets East Meets West, Kathmandu	17	(3)
Orphanage, Missionaries of Charity	20	(2)
Learning Gods	22	(3)
Twenty-first Century Religio-tropic	25	(2)
Crossing Borders	27	(3)
When They Came in with the New Regime	30	(3)
American Nomads	33	(4)
The Bird Cage	37	(2)
Bulimia Religiosa	39	(2)
Holy Ghost People	41	(3)
What Thaws Us	44	(3)
Metamorphosis	47	(2)
Empty	49	(1)
Thirty-one, Anthropologist, No Gods Left	50	(5)
II. NATURE/CULTURE
Snowflake Bentley	55	(2)
Liminal	57	(1)
White Tulip	58	(2)
Himalayas	60	(1)
A Woman at Night, Queens, N.Y.	61	(2)
When I Die	63	(4)
III. KINSHIP
The Fall of God the Father	67	(2)
Ana Begins, Postpartum	69	(5)
The Raw and the Sexed	74	(2)
Daily Bread	76	(1)
Rite of Passage	77	(1)
Anthropology	78	(2)
Ethnography of an Elderly Woman in Queens, N.Y.	80	(2)
Love Poem to Jane	82	(3)
Floodlight	85	(2)
Wildflowers	87	(2)
What I Want	89	(1)
Night Poppies	90	(1)
Post Script	91	(1)
The Cell	92	(2)
Flying Leap	94	(2)
Neon Birch	96	(3)
Notes	99	(1)
Acknowledgments	100	(2)
About the Author	102	(2)
Colophon	104