Like the painting on the cover, Job Lot Cheap, by John Frederick Peto, Scattergood's poems seem to be defiantly realistic in their detail as they imagine such divergency of place and mood as lost worlds, Biblical worlds, totalitarian regimes, and the nursery.
THE ABECEDARY
For nine months I held her
in the invisible room
of the abdomen,
the engine machinery
turning as she did
casual water sumersaults
amid dreams of milk and alphabets.
Now the crib slats hold her
in abacus rows, counting
the hours and inches
of her bone signature,
into the box of the future; the world
measured in ounces, two
inked footprints, fever,
dirt, halos.
Bio: AMY SCATTERGOOD a graduate of the Iowa Writer's Workshop, has received an Academy of American Poets prize and a GAP grant. Her poems have appeared in Grand Street, Nimrod, The Paris Review, and Prairie Schooner.
