{"product_id":"bicentennial-isbn-9780385349819","title":"Bicentennial","description":"From the acclaimed poet—a refreshing, singular collection of poems about boys and boyhood, historical cycles and personal history, memory and meaning.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003eBicentennial \u003c\/i\u003esummons the world of Chiasson’s seventies childhood in Vermont: early VCRs, snow, erections, pizza, snowmobiles, high-school cliques, and the Bicentennial celebration,  but his book is also an elegy for his father, whom he never knew and who died in 2009. In these poems, Chiasson movingly revisits the kind of autobiographical poems he wrote as a young man, but with a new existential awareness that individuals are always vanishing in time, and throughout the collection he ponders time’s conundrums. “All of history, even the Romans, \/ they happen later, tonight sleep tight,” he tells his sons at bedtime. “You’ll learn this later. Tonight, goodnight.” In the topsy-turvy world of \u003ci\u003eBicentennial,\u003c\/i\u003e history has both happened and is waiting to happen; boys grow up to be men; men never forget what it is to be boys; and fatherhood is the best answer to fatherlessness.Dan Chiasson is the author of three previous collections of poetry, most recently \u003ci\u003eWhere’s the Moon, There's the Moon,\u003c\/i\u003e and a book of criticism, \u003ci\u003eOne Kind of Everything: Poem and Person in Contemporary America. \u003c\/i\u003eHis essays on poetry appear widely. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Whiting Writers Award, Chiasson teaches at Wellesley College.Overtime\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e In this alternate basketball nobody plays, \u003cbr\u003e Both players try to tie the score: \u003cbr\u003e That way, at the buzzer, the game isn’t over.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Look, a show of courtesy: the winning player \u003cbr\u003e Is helping the loser score, the way \u003cbr\u003e Our youths assist the cold, suffering elderly.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Or here, a boy is helped to understand \u003cbr\u003e The exotica of his changing body: \u003cbr\u003e When X turns to Y you do not die;\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e When Y turns to Z we call it joy; \u003cbr\u003e This process crests until someday \u003cbr\u003e You fall off the edge of the alphabet.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e The players play even when they do not play; \u003cbr\u003e See, in just this way, we grow old \u003cbr\u003e Alongside the returned jays and fat magnolias;\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e The game goes on forever this way, the players \u003cbr\u003e Suspended in infinite overtimes, \u003cbr\u003e The score climbing in never-changing change—\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Until the day the backboard shatters \u003cbr\u003e And the blackboard blossoms \u003cbr\u003e With arcane formulae and blackbird wings.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e 7. lullaby\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Oh, all the stars, and the Big Dipper, \u003cbr\u003e And their reflections in the ocean: \u003cbr\u003e It doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter;\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e And the creatures, their weird behaviors, \u003cbr\u003e Some made to thrive, and some to die; \u003cbr\u003e Part of their natures, part of their natures;\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e It doesn’t matter, it happens later: \u003cbr\u003e All of creation, the seven days, \u003cbr\u003e The famous storm, the rainbow after;\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e One day the cardinal, he wakes up red; \u003cbr\u003e One day the jay realizes why \u003cbr\u003e Of all the creatures, he got his color:\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e This happens later, tonight, good night. \u003cbr\u003e When someone wins, somebody loses: \u003cbr\u003e Something is ravaged, something is fed;\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e All of history, even the Romans, \u003cbr\u003e They happen later, tonight sleep tight. \u003cbr\u003e You’ll learn this later. Tonight, good night.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e The Flume\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Here we go up again, up again, the mountain \u003cbr\u003e The men who have assembled it for years \u003cbr\u003e Assembled yesterday, so that you and I\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Headed who knows where together, but \u003cbr\u003e Headed there together, will see \u003cbr\u003e From the top the bottom, from the bottom the top,\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Then feel the inside-outside-all-over-nowhere \u003cbr\u003e My God I Am Going to Die, Not Someday, Now \u003cbr\u003e Sensation that, once we plateau, feels silly,\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Since when were we safer than when we sought \u003cbr\u003e The danger that when it subsided returned \u003cbr\u003e Us to the dangers it had blotted out?\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e There are no fears, here at the start: \u003cbr\u003e This is when, the book just opened, \u003cbr\u003e Knowing you will one day know the story\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e You don’t know yet changes the story \u003cbr\u003e You are getting to know, the way we know \u003cbr\u003e Before we know what anything means it means\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Something: a fireworks display, the birthday \u003cbr\u003e Of the Country; that’s me; my uncle and I \u003cbr\u003e Are racing through the past on the Python,\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Which men assembled absentmindedly that day \u003cbr\u003e And, so you could visit it with me, \u003cbr\u003e I assembled here again inside my memory;\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Now, when you remember how things were \u003cbr\u003e Today, you will also remember yourself \u003cbr\u003e Looking forward to yourself looking back,\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e A looking back that, here in your past, \u003cbr\u003e You do already, you already say \u003cbr\u003e About what happened yesterday, remember when . . . ?\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e —The future doing its usual loop-de-loop, \u003cbr\u003e The sons all turning into fathers \u003cbr\u003e Until the absentminded men take the ride down.","brand":"Knopf","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46304269697253,"sku":"NP9780385349819","price":26.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780385349819.jpg?v=1767722570","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/bicentennial-isbn-9780385349819","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}