Michael Jennings, author of Silky Thefts
Silky Thefts is a story of deserts and gardens, place and displacement, love and loss, time and the timeless. It posits a morally complex, troubled world, yet one where beauty still abides and the authenticity of voice and experience remains a viability—one man’s record of travel, a song of the self.
"This, then, is not a vision without hope; the hope is very difficult. It is that, somehow, the cruel indifference which constitutes our world and which we find either developing or originating in our-selves, may become not indifference but serenity."
—W. D. Snodgrass
from the foreword to The Hardman County Sequence
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UR OF THE CHALDEES
They are like aliens on the moon, the Americans—
bermuda shorts and cameras, pudgy, pale,
a little queasy from the train ride.
Dust from the storm in the night
has permeated everything they own
down to the skin.
They are not quite certain why they came,
and wear the baffled, blinking looks of baby birds.
The hole in the ground is the biggest I've ever seen,
with “evidence of the flood” – a four foot wide ribbon
of sand half way up the sides of an otherwise brown pit
strewn with broken bits of pottery. Local kids, urchins,
scamper down the steep, thin path at break-neck speed
for rials and dinars. They seem to have sprung up here
without benefit of parents or care. Across
the millennia, I feel the closeness of children
and the terrible price of money.
After a long climb, I am first to reach the summit
of the ziggurat
and so enter the dusky sky of Abraham.
I am 10. My heart is a drum.
I stand at the top of the god-forsaken world.
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Michael Jennings was born in New Orleans, grew up in east Texas and Iran, and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania and the Graduate Writing Program at Syracuse University. He has published five limited edition books of poems, including The Hardman County Sequence, with photographs by Dorothea Lange and a Foreword by W.D. Snodgrass, which is now a collectors' item. Jennings is the recipient of numerous poetry awards, and his poems have appeared in such journals as The Georgia Review, Sewanee Review, Southern Review, and The Chattahoochee Review. His latest book, Silky Thefts, was just released by Orchises Press in January 2007. Jennings is also an internationally recognized breeder and judge of Siberian Huskies and has written three books on the breed.
