You Want to Sell Me a Small Antique

Product Description The 2001 winner of the Peregrine Smith Poetry Competition, You Want to Sell Me a Small Antique combines prose and metered poems to evoke mysterious characters and smalltown settings from the distant past. He writes down his dreams in a little book tucked in his bedsheets. His gold fillings shine when he switches on the lamp at midnight to write in his notebook and calculate his horoscope. He knows his wife is asleep already. She knows he stays up very late. As he waits, he stares at her pale face, which is as dull as a sheeps. In an antique bureau, he hides a china doll, the one he fell in love with, where the maid each night stacks the bathtowels. Otherwise without company when the early constellations ride out, he invites her from her drawera girl with long auburn braids and saffron sleevesimagining the theater where once she was costumed to perform. From the Back Cover Rebecca Lilly has one of the most authentic voices in contemporary poetry. Her lines are deft, her images bitingly vivid. Her sentences make unexpected connections that seem inevitable. These poems are implicit fables, surreal cameos that, with inexorable logic, find the mystery in the ordinary, and make the familiar seem fantastic. They evoke the presence, and the macabre absence, of time, and showthe wholeness of all things. Robert Morgan In her first book, Rebecca Lilly takes us on a tour of a world where a dead person sends a postcard to the living, a fortuneteller informs a client that the sould is a window between future and past, and a darkeyed girl wears a coat lined with fur from the devils ears, a blind man watches his own funeral, a poor womans soul is served on a dish to angels, and a young scholar ponders whether time is a circle, square, or triangle. Lillys imagination is by turn philosophical, zany and poignant. It is as well versed in black comedy as it is in metaphysical speculation. These lucid, wellcrafted poems are full of gothic mysteries and wonderful surprises that keep you reading and make you want to read again and again. Henry Hart Winner of the 2001 Peregrine Smith Poetry Competition About the Author Rebecca Lilly has an M.F.A. in poetry from Cornell University and an M.A. in philosophy from Princeton. Her poetry has appeared in such journals as The Iowa Review, London Magazine, and Verse. Excerpt. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. He writes down his dreams in a little book tucked in his bedsheets. His gold fillings shine when he switches on the lamp at midnight to write in his notebook and calculate his horoscope. He knows his wife is asleep already. She knows he stays up very late. As he waits, he stares at her pale face, which is as dull as a sheeps. In an antique bureau, he hides a china doll, the one he fell in love with, where the maid each night stacks the bathtowels. Otherwise without company when the early constellations ride out, he invites her from her drawera girl with long auburn braids and saffron sleevesimagining the theater where once she was costumed to perform.