HADARA BAR-NADAV on

Gwendolyn Brooks
the rites for Cousin Vit

Carried her unprotesting out the door.
Kicked back the casket-stand. But it can't hold her,
That stuff and satin aiming to enfold her,
The lid's contrition nor the bolts before.
Oh oh. Too much. Too much. Even now, surmise,
She rises in the sunshine. There she goes,
Back to the bars she knew and the repose
In love-rooms and the things in people's eyes.
Too vital and too squeaking. Must emerge.
Even now she does the snake-hips with a hiss,
Slops the bad wine across her shantung, talks
Of pregnancy, guitars and bridgework, walks
In parks or alleys, comes haply on the verge
Of happiness, haply hysterics. Is.

Hadara Bar-Nadav is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, the Lucille Medwick Award from the Poetry Society of America, and other honors.  Her award-winning books include The New Nudity; Lullaby (with Exit Sign), awarded the Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize and a finalist for the Rilke Prize; The Frame Called Ruin, Editor’s Selection/Runner Up for the Green Rose Prize; and A Glass of Milk to Kiss Goodnight, awarded the Margie Book Prize. She is also the author of two chapbooks, Fountain and Furnace, awarded the Sunken Garden Prize, and Show Me Yours, awarded the Midwest Poets Series Prize. In addition, she is co-author with Michelle Boisseau of the best-selling textbook Writing Poems, 8th ed.  Individual poems appear in the American Poetry Review, The Believer, Kenyon Review, The New Republic, Ploughshares, Poetry, Tin House, and elsewhere.  Hadara is currently Professor of English and teaches in the MFA program at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.