Heartworm - Scheffler, Adam

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Résumé :
Winner of the 2021 Moon City Poetry Award

Imagine a keen eye and spritely intellect turned toward this thread-worn world. Heartworm, Adam Scheffler's second full-length poetry collection, gives readers exactly that. An example: The poem Advice from a Dog translates wisdom from, yes, a dog, beginning with the exhortation to Piss expressively. From there, however, the poem gets to the literal heart of the matter, commanding, [S]mell also the worms coiled up in / the human heart, thousands. But maybe you're not a dog person. For I Will Consider This Cockroach Belinda is a contemporary reworking of For I Will Consider My Cat Jeoffry by eighteenth-century poet Christopher Smart. Here, Scheffler praises Belinda, found in his sink like a tiny Vishnu waving her many arms, or creeping up the curved wall of the sink like a monk in silence. It doesn't matter what the world gives him; Scheffler pays attention - takes notes and shows up to the test prepared. Heartworm's forty-two poems send countless pricks and wriggles through the chest cavity as they ruminate on racehorses, ghosts, mosquitos, Zambonis, Mondays ... the ordinary and often devastating stuff of our lives.