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HOMINID UP

(Salmon Poetry, 2015)

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In Hominid Up, Shepard turns a nightmared, insomniac eye on both urban and rural landscapes: from the brassy multitudes of Manhattan, to the lone man standing in a northern stream. At the heart of this book is a darkly political vision of post-millennial America, exploring the tensions and flashpoints of class and race that lead us toward our days of reckoning. Whether examining “the ailments” on a city street where the Haves helicopter above the Have-nots, or the coastal communities from South Carolina to Maine, where the cruise-ship crowds mix uncomfortably with local fishermen, or the pastures of Vermont where developers buy up the hilltop acreage from cash-strapped farmers, Shepard immerses himself in this brazen new century and brings back “the bite and sting that bothers us all.”

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HOMINID UP

 

I write at night when the old hominid

climbs up to the highest branch of the brain

 

and crouches there in a leafy crotch 

listening to the night-sounds snarling below...

 

his heart outracing the big cats of the savannah.

He’s glad I’m civilized and live indoors,

 

far from the tooth and claw. Glad my central

plumbing works, my TP dispenser full,

 

so he doesn’t have to shit off a limb.

And though he loves roosting with birds,

 

the wind rocking him, talking through the mouths 

of leaves, he loves also how the birds have

 

been stuffed into the softest down pillows

where he may lay his head and dream. Dreams

 

are scarce as water-holes where he’s from, 

one eye always open for danger, one

 

for hunger. We’re kin for sure: the old beast

in me sleeps lightly or barely sleeps.

 

I wake often and watch him scratch himself

with a twig that could pass for a pencil

 

or poke at a moon-lit line of ants that

resembles this scratched pentameter.

 

Some nights we almost meet at a forking branch 

where he chooses silence, and I, this speech.

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