Penguins in a Warming World Quotes

“There is no mercy in a late-fall sun.
Tenacious single leaves sway, glow as if
a cunning master of the cinema placed
incandescent bulbs behind each one
to wrench the last gasp of our regret.”
― Anca Vlasopolos, Penguins in a Warming World

“When first I came to Detroit they took me, well-wishers,
to show me the materialized American dream
what
if I persisted and worked very very hard
I still could never have”
― Anca Vlasopolos, Penguins in a Warming World

“Don't turn your back on this tour
of a city of lost opportunities
Don't close your eyes
you'll miss beneath asphalt
the cobblestones, over a hundred years old,
brownstone houses lining the street
Paradise Valley,
swamp, they said, to be sucked dry
sanitized to glass boxes
hung over the river”
― Anca Vlasopolos, Penguins in a Warming World

“Look at that building shaped by
two streets colliding into an avenue
someone took trouble over the Doric columns,
marble balcony,
beyond plywood boarding windows
Catch obsidian glances on polished stone
and here on this empty street
Lift yourself up until you can trace with your finger
the whorls of that long-gone gable”
― Anca Vlasopolos, Penguins in a Warming World

“I drive through neighborhoods that have looked like this
for thirty years, only with time and in the rain the worse.
There always is a bit of lace on windows, a new
painted fence, old roses saved from the weeds'
stranglehold, and it takes so much more courage now,
when so much of what is left is field.”
― Anca Vlasopolos, Penguins in a Warming World

“you think, I have loved only once
and have buried
there's no reason
no reason at all to live in the light”
― Anca Vlasopolos, Penguins in a Warming World

“for who in the West would take us seriously
in our government-issue attire, we
not anticipating the more likely turn,
who in the West would pay us mind at all.”
― Anca Vlasopolos, Penguins in a Warming World

“yet he did live with images of water
falling over rock
on a slate bed forever gleaming
falling
among trees older than centuries
whispering vapors to nodding bluebells faint ferns
hallooing to the voices of the sky”
― Anca Vlasopolos, Penguins in a Warming World

“they ask the guide about the story
the only story the best story
because it is so comforting
for us to chip away at genius”
― Anca Vlasopolos, Penguins in a Warming World

“In the Museum of Archaeology in Athens
encased in glass in a room full of shadows
instruments fall quietly apart.”
― Anca Vlasopolos, Penguins in a Warming World

“Yet sometimes, rarely, it's true,
from a car speeding through
a dangerous zone of the city
you glimpse
behind a ruined house whose empty windows
stare at you knowingly
like sockets in a skull
a tulip still burning
among weeds,
the long-moldered gardener's
revenant.”
― Anca Vlasopolos, Penguins in a Warming World

“do you look back
still
from whatever dimension
our lost loves
roam”
― Anca Vlasopolos, Penguins in a Warming World

“It is the lesson you taught me: nothing is lost,
no, not a jot, not one subatomic particle.
Matter to energy, energy to matter.”
― Anca Vlasopolos, Penguins in a Warming World

“Those seeds, they
taste like nothing else in the world. They may not
have honey's burst of aching sweet or that lingering
bitter of chocolate or a scent on the tongue like
rose-petal jam making you think a flower
is climbing through your roof, unfolding inside
your brain. Those seeds, they're not even sharp
like a lemon that unlocks springs under your lip.

They're not like that at all.”
― Anca Vlasopolos, Penguins in a Warming World