hourglass museum

Kelli Russell Agodon is a prize-winning poet, writer and editor from the Northwest.  She chose one of my collages ("One Woman Frightened by Max Ernst's Nightingale") as the cover of her newest volume of poems entitled HOURGLASS MUSEUM.

And here's one of her beautiful haunting poems to convince you to buy yourself a new book of poetry:

Sketchbook With an Undercurrent of Grief

     I escape disaster by writing a poem with a joke in it:
     The past, present, and future walk into a bar--it was tense.
     There's everything to kill with laughter. I browsed
     the magazine in his hospital room. At my father's
     last breath, I saw an ad for sky.

     My father always said he was part Irish, part Scotch.
     I used to jog, but the ice kept falling out of my glass.
     I think of Warhol's Dom Perignon ad--dead artists
     returning to sell champagne.

     My father's body was moved from the room,
     they put ice on his eyes--the only organ healthy
     enough to donate. Did I start out by saying:
     I escape disaster by writing a poem with a joke in it?
     Those last five words weren't necessary.

     A girl walks into a bard.

(Kelli Russell Agodon, "HOURGLASS MUSEUM," 2014)