What do you think?
It Doesn't Matter What We Meant: Poems
An astonishing new collection of poems that question perception, meaning, and context.
How does private thinking align with public action? And what might it mean to intend something anyhow? To name our particulars? To translate from the personal to the communal, the pedestrian to the universal? In Rob Winger's new collection of poetry, such questions are less a circulatory system--heart and lungs and blood--than a ribcage, a structure that protects the parts that matter most. "I'd like to think," Winger writes, "it doesn't matter / what we meant." But is that right? Could it ever be?
Partly an investigation of system versus system error, It Doesn't Matter What We Meant asks us to own up to our own inherited contexts, our own luck or misfortune, our own ways of moving through each weekday. From meditations on sleepy wind turbines to Voyager 1's dormant thrusters, from country road culverts to the factory floor's punch clock, from allied English-to-English folkloric translations to the crumbling limestone of misremembered basements, this is poetry that complicates what it means to live within and beyond the languages, lexicons, and locations around us.
How does private thinking align with public action? And what might it mean to intend something anyhow? To name our particulars? To translate from the personal to the communal, the pedestrian to the universal? In Rob Winger's new collection of poetry, such questions are less a circulatory system--heart and lungs and blood--than a ribcage, a structure that protects the parts that matter most. "I'd like to think," Winger writes, "it doesn't matter / what we meant." But is that right? Could it ever be?
Partly an investigation of system versus system error, It Doesn't Matter What We Meant asks us to own up to our own inherited contexts, our own luck or misfortune, our own ways of moving through each weekday. From meditations on sleepy wind turbines to Voyager 1's dormant thrusters, from country road culverts to the factory floor's punch clock, from allied English-to-English folkloric translations to the crumbling limestone of misremembered basements, this is poetry that complicates what it means to live within and beyond the languages, lexicons, and locations around us.
- GenresPoetry
112 pages, Paperback
Published March 23, 2021
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Displaying 1 - 1 of 1 review
October 11, 2024
From the first stanza in the first poem, A Dozen Morning Translations, I was hooked. Throughout the entire collection, I was absolutely enamoured by the use of language; many lines left me reeling in the best way possible. Many of these poems felt like they had been torn straight out of my soul. Winger put words to feelings I hadn't fully recognized, but as soon as I read them, it felt like a puzzle piece fitting neatly into place.
In those years, people will say, we lost track of the meaning of we. / In those years, velvet barbarism. / In those years, arterial plaque still fixed.
- From But We Don't Live In A Perfect World
I'm wondering whether / or not humans are vile time bombs.
- From The White Apron
The mould on the bread / is a record of longing.
- From Eighteenth-Century Comet
Two of my favourites were The White Apron and Strawberry Ashberry, both lovely snippets of the reality and musings of everyday life
In those years, people will say, we lost track of the meaning of we. / In those years, velvet barbarism. / In those years, arterial plaque still fixed.
- From But We Don't Live In A Perfect World
I'm wondering whether / or not humans are vile time bombs.
- From The White Apron
The mould on the bread / is a record of longing.
- From Eighteenth-Century Comet
Two of my favourites were The White Apron and Strawberry Ashberry, both lovely snippets of the reality and musings of everyday life
Displaying 1 - 1 of 1 review