Losers

Colin Pope is the author of two previous collections, Prayer Book for the New Heretic and Why I Didn't Go to Your Funeral. His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Slate, The Kenyon Review, The Iowa Review, Blackbird, AGNI, Copper Nickel, and Poem-a-Day, among others, and he has received two Academy of American Poets prizes. He is the assistant director of creative writing at Northwestern University and is on the advisory boards of the literary journals RHINO and TriQuarterly. He is a native Adirondacker, currently living in Chicago.

I. Spitting Off the Overpass in December My Entire Youth Was Reaching Toward a Simile On the Various Disciplines of Losers The Ways They Die in Saranac Lake First Gun Throwing Stray Nails into Traffic Seventeen Years by the Saranac River The First Day After Graduation Drunk and Living Telling a Friend What My Father Did to Me Lightning Bug II. Funeral Rights of the Greater Mammals The Most Interesting Thing About Head Lice Learning to Dress a Doe How to Live with It The Ways Boys Find Pleasure Confession Because I Didn't Know What Affection Meant Between Two Men Scanner Flavor Country A History of Mirrors Trailer Trash III. You're Supposed to Enjoy Dying Shit Empathy After Flying into an Internal Rage at the People Who've Chosen to Occupy the Table Closest to Mine When the Entire Fucking Cafe Is Otherwise Empty, I Consider Various Atrocities Looking the Wrong Way at the Ocean Playhouse A Life Sentence Hand Gestures I Make in the Mirror to See if I Belong Anywhere Delivering Flowers Oh, Yes Acknowledgments

"Unflinching, intellectually agile, and emotionally exacting, Losers insists literature remain accountable to lived experience. It offers no easy consolations, only the hard-earned music of thought pushed to its limits. Every now and again, you will read a book that you wish you were poet enough to write. This is that book." - Airea D. Matthews, judge, Brittingham Prize in Poetry