A Mnemonic for Desire
About the collection
Language becomes a device for remembering our forgotten impulses and hidden longings, a place where a “song forms, rising out of nothing.” Rendered through the poet’s unique vision, the transformations and landscapes of the natural world and the everyday routines and accidents of the common individual become endeavors meant to uncover the concealed significance of existence.
About the author
Steve Mueske holds an MFA in Writing from Hamline University and has published prose and poetry in many print and online journals, including Best New Poets 2005. He lives in the American Midwest where he edits the online literary arts journal three candles, and is the publisher of three candles press. He edits the online journal poetry365.com, as well. Steve has a previous chapbook, Whatever the Story Requires.
Blurbs
“What I love most about this book is the voice that animates so many of the poems. I trust it immediately, this mix of worldliness and amazement. [Mueske’s] is a voice that knows what it means to be beaten down, but also what it means to rise up. By the last section, the poems have become hymns to intimacy, beautifully sung, believable, and necessary.” —Jim Moore, author of Lightning at Dinner (Graywolf Press)
“In one of these poems, Steve Mueske speaks of bats settling at dusk in “a sympathetic world built/from the echoes of the given.” He might equally be speaking of the world offered in these poems—also a sympathetic world, filled with echoes of the givens of home and of nature, but spiraling away into an imaginative place, full of surprises. The poems glitter with supple and original images, grounded always in sturdy, muscular language…each poem searches for, and finds, the form in which its music and vision can work together for the reader’s delight.” —judith barrington, author of Horses and the Human Soul (Storyline Press)
“Steve Mueske’s reality presses in from all sides, from the natural world to the surreal, from the woods and fields to the twilit city. Check out the black and yellow spider. Check out the 44th Street avatar. This voice celebrates dream and music, it celebrates being alive.”—Joseph Millar, author of Overtime (Eastern Washington University Press)
“I don’t recall a first book so abundant with wild and compelling self portraits, so remarkable in its variety of places, times, emotional currencies, or this riveting as we watch the narrator seek and find the holiness in a life honorably lived and imagined. People who love what poetry can mean and be will gravitate to A Mnemonic for Desire. The rewards that come from deep reading and deep feeling flow from this book.”—Deborah Keenan, author of Good Heart (Milkweed Editions)
Reviews
Alsop Review “[This book] It reconciles the lyrical with the grim, examines the impulses toward hope and despair. With so many poems so remarkable in range, the work looms large.” Reviewed by Cheryl Snell
“… a diverse collection of poems that is certain to offer something surprising and interesting to almost every reader.” Reviewed by Shawn Pittard
Sample Poem
A Short History of Things Not Quite Themselves
In fall the dogwood remembers
the former fullness of itself-with-blossoms,
the way a rag, once a favored shirt,
lingers for the body, the way
a bra misses its unscarred mistress,
hangs now on a hook in the dark,
where the ties used to be. Sometimes
things just aren’t right—
are caught in a power outage, left
unattended or broken. It’s not
always a matter of fault.
The silence is not silent.
Under the soft layers of dust
is more dust, then the idea of dust
in that tenuous layer between table
and air. Hear that? No, not
the keening of the vagabond
whose one song has the power
to raise the dead. The other:
trapdoors, unhinged and screwless,
flapping in changeable weather.
They are testifying like true apostles
to all who will hear: It’s me. Me, goddamnit.
