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    A Brief History of Fruit: poems
    A Brief History of Fruit: poems
    A Brief History of Fruit: poems
    Ebook127 pages1 hour

    A Brief History of Fruit: poems

    By Kimberly Quiogue Andrews

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    About this ebook

    In Kimberly Quiogue Andrews's award-winning full-length debut, A Brief History of Fruit, we are shuttled between the United States and the Philippines in the search for a sense of geographical and racial belonging. Driven by a restless need to interrogate the familial, environmental, and political forces that shape the self, these poems are both sensual and cerebral: full of “the beautiful science,” as she puts it, of “naming: trees of one thing, then another, then yet another.” Colonization, class dynamics, an abiding loneliness, and a place's titular fruit—tiny Filipino limes, the frozen berries of rural America—all serve as focal markers in a book that insists that we hold life's whole fragrant pollination in our hands and look directly at it, bruises and all. Throughout, these searching, fiercely intelligent and formally virtuosic poems offer us a vital new perspective on biracial identity and the meaning of home, one that asks us again and again: “what does it mean, really, to live in a country?”
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Akron Press
    Release dateFeb 27, 2020
    ISBN9781629221632
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      Book preview

      A Brief History of Fruit - Kimberly Quiogue Andrews

      floor.

      I.

      We might want to believe that we can condemn and we can love and we can condemn because we love our country, but that’s too complex.

      Still Life with Metalworking Shop

      (Central Pennsylvania, ca. 1960)

      (Ink on paper)

      In this scene, we can see that the catalogue of the gone records itself among the catalogue of what remains. The objects resting in partial shadow upon the higher shelves (a single heatproof glove, fourteen nails in a box marked Pepsi-Cola, fluid in a jar) most readily draw the eye, creating a sense of mystery but also directing the gaze eventually downward, as if through layers of soil. Particularly evocative in this instance—not often found in the still life, artists preferring the fruits of the hunt, or as is well known, literal fruit—are the boxes and boxes of relatively small-caliber bullets slotted into a custom-built storage unit, indicating that this shop was used almost exclusively for the fashioning of rifles. Suggestive of the card catalogues that once lined library walls, the array of ammunition invites the viewer to think about the organizational qualities of violence. An oiled rag indicates attention to detail. Questions for art educators: how does this scene juxtapose nostalgia and the domination of man over nature? What physical sensations are evoked by the hard lines of the anvil in the lower right-hand side of the frame? How do those sensations contrast with those produced by the empty, wheeled wooden chair, center off-left, rolled slightly away from a desk upon which rest yet more bullets, some graph paper, writing utensils, and other things now lost to the mind trying to retrieve this picture for the viewer? How do you think the owner of this chair might react if his son married someone who was not white? If you or a family member has ever aimed a gun at an animal, perhaps the array of tools scattered about the scene will hold a special meaning. You can write these down on paper, and they will become a bouquet of pheasants, flushed and

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