After Party
Poems
The geography of After Party includes married life and fatherhood, a childhood survived if not fully understood, the transition from youth to an adulthood filled with responsibilities, and the dangers of our current world and culture—on a personal and global scale—that can distract and disrupt life and our idea of home. By turns funny and heartbreaking, flirtatious and frank, Blaustein never lets his aggravation or confusion overwhelm his sense of gratitude for the life he leads and those he loves.
His observational lines have a refreshingly unschooled sensibility, with an emphasis on the masculine experience.
Blaustein is as canny as Odysseus returned home and stringing his bow. Vagabond and shining like the sea, his poems drag you to deep undercurrents as you are caught singing in their chains.
Here’s one of the many things I love about Noah Blaustein’s poetry and his bright and tender and honest new book After Party: everything you thought you were reading is broken, then willed back. It looks the same, but having been touched by the ripples he’s launched, it can never be the same again.
These are poems full of vivid particularities, poems that know ‘it’s easier to love / this world than it is to disappear.’ Noah Blaustein is a believer in hard-earned wisdom—’suffering is measured / by the strength of one’s fears’—and a poet of ferocious nostalgia.
Noah Blaustein is the author of Flirt (UNM Press) and the editor of the anthology Motion: American Sports Poems. He lives in Santa Monica, California.
Moonlight Sonata for the Oughts
1.
& After
Trigger Warning:
California Dreaming
The Snow Globe of My Youth
Fable
Coming-of-Age Story #∝: Angry Bastard Theory
After Party
El Niño, El Viejo, El Viento
Hip & Now
Prince Lightning, Prince Thunder
2.
Coming-of-Age Story: Icons
What’s Going On?
Tide Pool
Toast
Topanga Beach, West Lot
Remembering the Decade
Tattoo: Poses 2 & 5
Fracture & Want
Tattoo Nude: Fan Mail, Pose #4 (More Ars Poetica)
Lemons
3.
Temple
Androids Don’t Just Dream of Electric Sheep
What Happens Next I Will Think About Later
"That’s God’s Work"
There Is No Thou to Speak of
This Year. Last Year.
I’m on a Good Mixture & I Don’t Want to Waste It
Vertigo
Aubade
Old School
"Everything I Have Is on the Table, Everything I Love Is out to Sea"
Acknowledgments
Liner Notes
