The Americans

The Americans is a compelling meditation on the ways we go about our lives at this cultural moment, often unmoored from the facts of history though we drift along its shores. Part complicated love letter to suburbia, these poems demand that we consider not only what we are drawn to but also what we fail to see, how the apocryphal feeds our cultural amnesia. The poet asks: 'Must nostalgia / walk like a prince through all our rooms?' This lovely collection shows us a way to confront that question within ourselves.
Natasha Trethewey, U.S. Poet Laureate
Winner, 2014 Julie Suk Award

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David Roderick’s second book, The Americans, pledges its allegiance to dirt. And to laptops. And to swimming pools, the Kennedys, a flower in a lapel, plastic stars hanging from the ceiling of a child’s room, churning locusts, a jar of blood, a gleam of sun on the wing of a plane. His poems swarm with life. They also ask an unanswerable question: What does it mean to be an American? Restless against the borders we build—between countries, between each other—Roderick roams from place to place in order to dig into the messy, political, idealistic and ultimately inexplicable idea of American-ness. His rangy, inquisitive lyrics stitch together a patchwork flag, which he stakes alongside all the noise of our construction, our obsessive building and making, while he imagines the fate of a nation built on desire.
Winner of the 2014 Julie Suk Award for the best poetry book published by an independent press.

88 Pages, 6 x 8.2 in.

August, 2014

isbn : 9780822963127

about the author

David Roderick

David Roderick’s first book of poems, Blue Colonial, won the APR/Honickman Prize. He has published poetry and fiction in several journals, including the Hudson Review, the Georgia Review, Indiana Review, New England Review, Poetry, the Southern Review, Slate, and the Virginia Quarterly Review. Roderick is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow and was awarded the Amy Lowell Traveling Scholarship, among other honors. Poems from this collection have won Shenandoah’s James Boatwright III Prize and the Campbell Corner Poetry Prize, sponsored by Sarah Lawrence College. Roderick is associate professor of English in the MFA program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

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David Roderick