Streets in Their Own Ink: Poems [Paperback]

Stuart Dybek (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 21, 2006

"Streets in Their Own Ink . . . has a gritty realism infused with a sense of the marvelous." --Edward Hirsch, The Washington Post

In a city like that one might sail
through life led by a runaway hat.
The young scattered in whatever directions
their wild hair pointed and, gusting
into one another, they fell in love.
-from "Windy City"

In his second book of poems, Stuart Dybek finds vitality in the same vibrant imagery that animates his celebrated works of fiction. The poems of Streets in Their Own Ink map the internal geographies of characters who inhabit severe and often savage city streets, finding there a tension that transfigures past and present, memory and fantasy, sin and sanctity, nostalgia and the need to forget. Full of music and ecstasy, they consecrate a shadowed, alternate city of dreams and retrospection that parallels a modern city of hard realities. Ever present is Dybek's signature talent for translating "extreme and fantastic events into a fabulous dailiness, as though the extraordinary were everywhere around us if only someone would tell us where to look" (Geoffrey Wolff).

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

*Starred Review* Dybek's ravishing short stories, appearing most recently in I Sailed with Magellan (2003), are remarkably poetic; his stunning poems possess fiction's velocity; and both grow out of his mythic sense of place, that is, of a city not only of brick and mortar but also of dreams and reflections. Profoundly attuned to the music of the senses and to nature's persistence, Dybek unveils worlds within worlds as a young boy submerges his soapy head in water, a girl's unbuttoned sundress falls, and nighthawks fly past an illuminated billboard. So precise are his arresting descriptions, and so startlingly lucid are his metaphors, his poems ignite in the mind like unexpected fireworks. As the titles "Autobiography," "Journal," and "Anti-Memoir" suggest, Dybek is intrigued with the workings of memory and the skewed stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. Wind-blown scraps of paper, snatches of music, and echoes of church rituals in everyday gestures, all are haunting intimations of our transitoriness and our tentative connections. Kin to the work of Charles Simic, Dybek's tensile poems possess a phosphorescent beauty and express a wry yet tender regard for all that makes us human. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

"A poet of the city, [Dybek] offers us what Eliot once called 'such a vision of the street / as the street hardly understands.'" --Sandra M. Gilbert, Poetry

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Product Details

• Paperback: 88 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; First Edition edition (March 21, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374529914
• ISBN-13: 978-0374529918
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.6 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #746,242 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of My Favorites, February 26, 2011

By 

Kristin Nicole - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Streets in Their Own Ink: Poems (Paperback)

First of all, I am extremely proud to have the supreme honor of being the first to review this anthology.

I stumbled across Stuart Dybek's "We Didn't" (I Sailed with Magellan) in my university's Short Story class, and absolutely fell in love with the prose. His writing is like nothing I've ever read before, though he has been compared in to Richard Carver in some circles, and called a Polish-Kerouac in others.

"Streets" immediately became one of my most cherished poetry anthologies (I loved it so much I bought a signed first edition). It is hypnotic, haunting, riveting, and I recommend it to all poetry readers who are interested in modern poetry and free-verse style.

"Anti-Memoir" is perhaps the best poem of the set:

"Tonight, follow the mute street singer / Unimpended by sight, he leads/down passageways you thought deleted, / diction stripped like stolen cars, / barricades of syntax broken by emotion, / sighs of plaster dust, the haze / of white space between words. Don't pause / for punctuation, here, a comma / of indecision elides into a coma, / and, years later, one wakes / to the interminable typing of rain / in a hotel where transients waste / money good for alcohol's blue flame/on sleep. Outside, the homeless / congregate while you continue to rent / all the rooms you've left to behind, / addresses one must be lost to find, / knee deep in flooded storm drains / clogged with crushed revisions, / a shredded blizzard, a ticker tape parade / gusting from the out-turned pockets / of the dead, enough litter / to trash the future, fuel without heat, / and yet, the past combustible enough to be compressed into a fistful of soot."

This is an example of the style, but is not the entire poem and is less effective when read out of context (or without it's beginning or end).

I highly recommend this anthology, as well as all of Stuart Dybek's writing. It is my humble opinion that "The Coast of Chicago" (prose) and "Streets" are the best examples of his work.