Description
The 2001 winner of the Peregrine Smith Poetry Competition, You Want to Sell Me a Small Antique combines prose and metered poems to evoke mysterious characters and small-town settings from the distant past.
“He writes down his dreams in a little book tucked in his bedsheets. His gold fillings shine when he switches on the lamp at midnight to write in his notebook and calculate his horoscope. He knows his wife is asleep already. She knows he stays up very late. As he waits, he stares at her pale face, which is as dull as a sheep’s. In an antique bureau, he hides a china doll, the one he fell in love with, where the maid each night stacks the bathtowels. Otherwise without company when the early constellations ride out, he invites her from her drawer–a girl with long auburn braids and saffron sleeves–imagining the theater where once she was costumed to perform.”
