The Drunken Piano
Russell Thorburn
Joe DiMaggio Watches
His Wife, Marilyn Monroe,
Flirt with New Yorkers
All those leers
outside the Trans-Luxe Hotel
as the steam from the ventilator
grate blows her skirt up
around her waist, someone shouting
hey look over here on the sidewalk,
Marilyn disappearing
into little else
but lipstick and a beauty
spot, her legs up to her panties,
Joe smudging his love out
in a cigarette, her blonde walk
wanting to please America,
and Joe in his white suit
walking out on love, muttering
damn Marilyn, as he hits one
final good-bye into the stands
and around the bases
he runs with his ears.
The Mattress Caught in the Axle of the Bus
wound around more than once
before the fabric broke, the Serta
sleepwear slashed across its name,
as if you could no longer rest
with curls traipsing through
cold backyards, your proof now
for what you always knew, that
sleep could be murdered.
You saw grass wear coats of fluff
and those whorls playing tag
all the way to a tree; you skipped
forward, quick steps, trying
to catch nothing heavier than
a word, a sleep of starlings
letting go your dreams, their flock
on the edge of kissing
your solitary place.
ISBN 1-59661-113-8
64 pages/$15
Thorburn writes across as broad an imaginative spectrum as any poet working today. The subjects of The Drunken Piano are exquisitely varied—real and fantastic literary biography, childhood rapture, rock and roll, adolescence, old movies, spies, soldiers, love, baseball played by sons and legends, the Russian cold of upper Michigan. And through all this, the mental life we inhabit has a consistent complexity, depth, and (above all) authenticity that makes this book the best of company.
—Jonathan Johnson,
associate professor at the Inland Northwest Center for Writers,
the graduate writing program at Eastern Washington University;
poet, Mastodon, 80% Complete and In the Land We Imagined Ourselves
Notes pulled from a Bergmanesque cello, house whiskey, the grainy surface of film noir detective movies—sepia nights and sleepless mornings, you will want Russell Thorburn’s Drunken Piano at your bedside…travel with them in your back pocket, but you won’t rest easy: these poems are too miraculous for that.
—Bronwyn Mills,
Professor of Caribbean Literature
at Northern Michigan University,
author of the forthcoming novel, Beastly
In The Drunken Piano Russell Thorburn creates an intense and complicated emotional persona by using the fictional consciousness of others. It’s edgy stuff, out there where death, sex, war, and nature intermingle into blisters of erotic awareness. Thorburn creates a dynamic that transcends the merely notational narrative of the historical, assimilating his truths into a powerful poetic style. Heavily enjambed, his diction and syntax are brutally harsh in the service of beauty and truth. These are some of the most urgent lyric intertwinings I’ve read in a while—narrative poems of such velocity they blur into music, and, I am tempted to say, pure song. And yet it is a terrible music as well, completely authentic. Read this book for the way it shatters the boundaries of “story” by creating an original and necessary human noise that is the thing we remember when we put the book down. Which is why we return. Russell Thorburn has turned into the kind of poet I want to read and reread over and over again. One of the few.
—David Dodd Lee,
poet, author of Downsides of Fish Culture, Wilderness,
Arrow Pointing North, and The Nervous Filaments
Russell Thorburn is the author of three books of poems: Approximate Desire (New Issues Press, 1999), Father, Tell Me I Have Not Aged (Marick Press, 2007), and The Whole Tree as Told to the Backyard (Littérature d’Aphélie, 2009). His chapbooks include Henry Zender and The Weight of Umber and Sienna (March Street Press, 1995 and 2001). He teaches poetry in a small mining town in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.