Oberlin College Press

Jonah Winter

AMNESIA Winner of the 2003 FIELD Poetry Prize

Paper $14.95 (ISBN 0-932440-96-7)

"Jonah Winter resides in the Hotel Amnesia, the Hotel of Stars--and though he's a comedian, his room is one along the corridor of the wistful, urbane dreamers: Joseph Cornell, Jean Cocteau, Anais Nin, Charles Simic. At the heart of his method is the list, almost verbless: his marvelous catalogues place unlikely things side by side, creating within the frame of the poem the tantalizing windows of the city of dream."
--Mark Doty

"Through revelations, paradoxes, and the kind of startling connections we cherish in dreams, Jonah Winter's poetry gives us the secret lives of our surroundings, lovingly and beautifully rendered."
--Nancy Willard

RESISTANCE

The expressionless teller at the first Virginia Bank or
the black fabric of your stockings or
the darkness of a closed news stand or
the way it feels to be face down on Nineteenth Street.

The way the night shovels away the day,
the way two walls push each other back,
the way the airport bar empties out
and the leather bar stools look like serious drinkers.

And you went home and cried for three months.
And I brought you an apple wrapped in paper.
And I sat for hours in your kitchen chair
which, with help from the bright fluorescent lights,

kept me from falling through to the cellar
of Valhalla, as when we're lying by each other
and each of our bodies is keeping us both
apart.

--Jonah Winter