Demeter Press | birth of the uncool

Price: $14.95

Page Count: 110

Publication Date: April 2014

ISBN: 978-1-927335-37-6

You are at your most uncool now age spotted, raggedy, not giving a shit, saucy, insouciant, real, crackly and juicy at once. —from “Crackly and juicy” Birth of the Cool, a compilation album by jazz great Miles Davis, was released in 1957, the year before I was born. That album defined “cool jazz”: elegant, distant, hip, and stylish. Davis and his eight comusicians made it all look so easy. From the time I was very young, I was trying to be as cool as Davis’s jazz: aloof, intellectual, desired, mysterious, alluring, and perfect. Only in my fifties did I understand that I had to relinquish this striving and rebirth the uncool parts of me—those bits that are sentimental, awkward, and vulnerable. This book is an eclectic and uncoolly accessible collection of musings on motherhood, childhood, recovery, faith, and love.

“With raw honesty and daring, Madeline Walker weaves a tender poetic mix of difficult topics. But despite their darkness, their heaviness, she brings light to shame, guilt, death, and hate by naming them head on. Walker raises the ordinary above the everyday and integrates the vernacular and high literature. With a deep understanding of language and mythology, Walker’s first collection of poetry, birth of the uncool, slides in and out of opposites, demonstrating the unity of all things.”
—Arleen Paré, author of Paper Trail and Leaving Now

I Recovery
My Ariadne
Storm
Local sources
Recovery means
Feed your demon
The Dr. Seuss challenge
Bleak trail
Keep
Leaf people
Out of caves into the light
Epistemology check
Third step, a villanelle

II Youth
The Stag
Schoolgirl
Looking a gift horse in the mouth
Daisy
Coming of age in Toronto
Bell bottom blues
Broad back of life
Paradise lost

III Motherhood
As was your plan
Mother to mother
Cupcake
Big rock candy mountain
Vacation on the farm
Light the way
Youngest learns to ride a bike
Young noble
Eldest son

IV Coming Home
Around the house: A week of domestic sedokas
Marriages past and present
Rhubarb harvest
A house is a home
A honeymoon tale
NYC quartet
Death of the planet
Paper sheets
The sex life of a middle aged woman

V Birth of the Uncool
Aubade to the body
Elegy
Last cry
Hope shimmers
Fist
Leo
Apocrypha
Ego
Winston’s dream
Poetree
Crackly and juicy
Birth of the Uncool

Madeline Walker is a writer and academic writing instructor at the
School of Nursing at the University of Victoria. Her first book, The
Trouble with Sauling Around: Conversion in Ethnic American Autobiography,
1965-2002, was published in 2011. Her work has also
been published in Room, University of Toronto Review, the Journal
for Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, and English Studies
in Canada. She lives in Victoria, British Columbia, with her husband
and two cats.

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birth of the uncool

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