Mister Toebones

an octopus to the mentality of other mollusks, such as mussels and clams. The author, on the other hand, feels drawn toward flickerings of consciousness at the subatomic and super galactic levels.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to the editors of the following magazines for publishing poems from this collection: Agni (“Catullus, Carmen III,” “Catullus, Carmen VIII,” “From Anyte of Tegea”); The Atlantic (“The Other World”); Corresponding Voices (“Love and Empire,” “Message, 1944” [under the title “Information, 1944”], “The Cormorant at Snooks Pond,” “Qoheleth,” “Unlit Kitchen, 5 A.M.”); The Georgia Review (“Olm,” “Where But to Think Is to Be Full of Sorrow”); Michigan Quarterly Review (“Oceanic,” “To the Water Bear”); New England Review at Breadloaf website (“Mister Toebones,” “Tracks Everywhere at Noon”); The Paris Review (“A Cat Lover’s Guide to The Bell Curve”); Ploughshares (“The Arctic Vortex at Snooks Pond, 2014”); The Progressive (“Don’t Get Me Wrong”); Smartish Pace (“The Featherbed”); Southern Humanities Review (“A Voter from Mississippi Considers the State Constitution”); Virginia Quarterly Review (“Observations from a Hillside Stairway on the Day of Atonement, Just Before My Wife and Daughters Break Their Fast,” “Bananas,” “The Journal of Dr. Beaurieux”); Waxwing (“To Abu Ali al-Hasan ibn al-Hasan ibn al-Haytham,” “Copernicus”); and The Yale Review (“Lingerie Femme and the Vagaries of Pronunciation”).
Thanks to Deborah Garrison, whose editing of four collections of my poems has been the most constant support of my life in publishing. Todd Portnowitz has been a crucial help in bringing out this book. My wife Francie and our three children have given me the only world where these poems could have come to be.


A Note About the Author
Brooks Haxton has published nine books of poetry, a nonfiction account of his son’s career in high-stakes poker, and translations from Greek, French, and German. His poems have appeared in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and elsewhere, and his nonfiction has been featured in The New York Times Sunday Magazine. He wrote the script for a film on the life and work of Tennessee Williams, broadcast in the American Masters series. A recipient of grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Guggenheim Foundation, and others, Haxton has taught for many years in the graduate creative writing programs of Syracuse University and Warren Wilson College.


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