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Rational Anthem
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Rational Anthem
Current price: $17.95
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Size: Paperback
In a voice at times electrified by caustic cynicism, at other times stripped bare by grief, Casey Thayer’s
offers wry tribute to “the greatest country God could craft with the mules he had / on hand.” In seeking to tell the story of the ragged world around him, Thayer examines the links among flag-waving populism, religious fervor, and toxic masculinity. Here male intimacyamong childhood friends, between father and son, and in the tenuous bonds between young adultsgenerally finds acceptance only when expressed through a shared passion for guns and hunting: “I helped my father clean his hands with field grass, / convinced we had shared a moment / in rolling the internal organs out of the abdomen.”
In “How-To,” the book’s closera mash-up of instructions from active-shooter trainings attended by the poetThayer grasps at strategies for surviving a world where we have come to see school shootings as routine: “Grab a textbook, they instructed my child, and hug it to your chest over your heart.”
Formally deft and lyrically dense,
asks why we find it so hard to change the stories we keep repeating.