Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    I Love Information: Poems
    I Love Information: Poems
    I Love Information: Poems
    Ebook99 pages2 hours

    I Love Information: Poems

    By Courtney Bush

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    I Love Information, selected by Brian Teare as a winner of the 2022 National Poetry Series, is a sophisticated and cerebral examination of knowledge, belief, and which begets which.

    Egret feathers. Pulverized chickpeas. A “faint but constant series of ovals and lines” that, remarkably, spell the name Penelope. “Nobody owns the meaning of these things,” Courtney Bush writes, but this does not stop the poet from seeking, from “reading meaning in the garbage” and in the flowers growing there. What does she seek? Not facts. Instead, something transcendent and mysterious, knowledges that can only be unlocked through experimentation with language, with art.

    In lieu of linear thought, Bush’s poems operate under unique logic systems that grow and branch like vines, driven not only by the urge to learn but also by the need for connection—between people, things, stories. Her speakers make cognitive leaps with youthful credulity, eager and open. “It comes down to a few things,” says one. “Vessels and bags / Every crude tool / Every day a friend to tell.” And another: “I want to tell you what a sword is. / To want to tell you has been my entire life.” They are explorers of the pathways between our outer and inner worlds, translators between what is and what could be.

    Bush’s reverence for the act of thought echoes that of a religious scholar gazing at the heavens. In order to learn, these poems suggest, we must believe the not-known is worth knowing. We must let belief hover around all parts of our lives, as a child does. “To have the idea of the secret chord is to have the secret chord,” Bush writes. To learn, we must make believe.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMilkweed Editions
    Release dateAug 22, 2023
    ISBN9781639550029
    I Love Information: Poems
    Author

    Courtney Bush

    Courtney Bush is the author of I Love Information and Every Book Is about the Same Thing. Her films, made with collaborators Jake Goicoechea and Will Carington, have been screened at festivals internationally. She lives and works as a nanny in New York.

    Related to I Love Information

    Related ebooks

    Poetry For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Three Poems

      Mar 1, 2022

      i look like someonehealing from an accidentbecause i am someonehealing from an accidentthe book of actsscales falling from saul’s eyesremembering my capacityfor stillnesshow long can i sitwithout looking awaythe fear of god escapingi desperately need

      3 min read

    • Article

      Devil Asks Why You Would Mouth The Word Pity

      Jul 1, 2022

      even in this abundance of dark? Even in this abundance of dark you have totake the stars on faith. Look: Under today’s dim sky there is a basket.In that basket there is a fish. Come night, you are the animal that will eat the best parts of it. And ye

      1 min read

    • Article

      Toward A Unified Theory

      Jan 1, 2022

      Condemned to live inside the weatherof our moods What are you doing? Filling this bucket with waterand dumping it into the water They can’t excavate the amphitheater further because it extends backbeneath the houses We close their eyes not for thembu

      2 min read

    • Article

      Six Sonnets

      Jan 1, 2021

      Goldenrod, I could say, you know, everybody wants somethingfrom me, but, well, everybody wants something and nobody wantsnothing from me, goldenrod, towhead, beast. Goldenrod, you packthe meadows like gold-plated sardines. I have heart palpitationsbu

      3 min read

    • Article

      Where To Start With Louise Glück, Winner Of The 2020 Nobel Prize In Literature

      Oct 14, 2020

      The Swedish Academy has awarded this year's Nobel Prize in literature to Louise Gluck, a former U.S. poet laureate. The 16th woman to win the prestigious prize and the first American woman since Toni Morrison in 1993, Gluck is the author of 12 poetry

      3 min read

    • Article

      Three Poems

      Jul 1, 2020

      She was a security guard and even though her uniform was black I could seeIt was covered in blood, the marble floor was covered in blood, it wasSlowly pooling out from the space where HER HAND used to beOh my god, I said, then I started to say, YOUR

      3 min read

    • Article

      Reactions

      Aug 17, 2022

      Reactions
      2 min read

    • Article

      Think What a Poem Might Do: A Conversation with Jill Bialosky and Matthew Zapruder

      Aug 17, 2017

      What, if anything, do you think poetry can do for us in these difficult times? The post Think What a Poem Might Do: A Conversation with Jill Bialosky and Matthew Zapruder appeared first on The Millions.

      10 min read

    • Article

      Diaspora Sonnets

      Sep 1, 2022

      The old men drink their spritzers and gossipunder awnings. Red hued and blustery, like two roosters on the side of a road.Skyward they crane their necks and laugh, sometimes they wonder about kings and future kingsand how the muscles peer from their

      2 min read

    • Article

      Two Poems by Jesse Nathan

      Jun 8, 2021

      Young gray cat puddled under the boxwood,Only the eyes alert. Appressed to dirt. That hissThe hiss of the grasses hissing What shouldWhat should. Blank road shimmers. On days like this,My mind, you hardlySeem to be.On days like these. No, no. See tha

      1 min read

    • Article

      What Living In A House Is Like

      May 1, 2022

      Standing in each stanza—no, I’m sorry—room. Standing in each room waslike standing in a tester stroke of wall paint. All these blobs of colors in rows and columns, the size of thumbs.Together—a portrait of potential. But blues leaped to yellow leaped

      1 min read

    • Article

      Pilgrim Bell

      Aug 18, 2021

      The self I am today.Involves me.As a lake. Involves.Its cattails.It bears me.Tolerates.My cotton. I would prefer.Not. To be outlived.By anyone. I reserve the right.To refuse. Enchantment. The fables I tell.Always end. Wrong.The good archer.Dead.By a

      1 min read

    • Article

      Bookshelf

      Aug 3, 2020

      Bookshelf
      7 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Max Porter

      Dec 6, 2019

      I would have been lost this year (as any other) without poetry to cling to and travel with. The post A Year in Reading: Max Porter appeared first on The Millions.

      3 min read

    • Article

      Five Poems

      Mar 1, 2022

      Five Poems
      5 min read

    • Article

      Five Poems

      Nov 1, 2021

      It is all, allover the earth, underearth, a graveyard: tree ferns, trees—roots,bark, seeds—ancientlife that emerged from the sea, forestsflooded to swamps& bogs, transformed to peat, transformedagain, sunk, coveredwith layers of earth with strangeamp

      2 min read

    • Article

      Five Poems

      Nov 1, 2018

      Moon river, swollen river, river of starholeand bright, harness river, lichen river,river we velvet with our filth.River of butter and river of witches, rivercracked open careful like egg, or burstapart, unleashing its violet load.River mouths, river

      2 min read

    • Article

      Three Poems

      Nov 1, 2023

      for Brenda Shaughnessy The news isn’t good, and neither of us feelslike pretending, though the list of what we hope forgrows longer by the day. More news, goodor otherwise, everything witnessed by the lightof fires, and something we cherished alwaysb

      2 min read

    • Article

      Two Poems

      Jan 1, 2022

      Two Poems
      2 min read

    • Article

      Learning From Poetic Closure

      Jan 1, 2022

      In the 1980s while scholars were obsessed with theory, I was in a course of study, Japanese language and literature, that barely seemed touched by such heady stuff. Fortunately, one professor offered a graduate class designed to familiarize us with B

      14 min read

    • Article

      from BLACK PASTORAL

      Nov 1, 2023

      somewheres, some lifetimes ago I have run so far, so long.There is nowhere I haven’t beenBut here, in this field, a bodyLength from the ragged brinkThat gives way to forest.I collapsed here, the thin, hard slipOf me whittled at both ends.I want badly

      4 min read

    • Article

      On Louise Glück

      Dec 1, 2021

      I WAS LYING in bed late at night, woeful, confused by another death, this one the death of a close friend; the losses had been mounting steadily, a bewildering number of losses, each one specific, difficult to accept, hard to overcome, and I must hav

      12 min read

    • Article

      Five Poems

      Nov 1, 2020

      The American linden sways nonplussed by the storm,a bounce here, a shimmy there, just shaking like musicleft over from the night’s end wafting into the avenues before sleep.I remember once walking down Clinton Street, and singingthat line returning,

      4 min read

    • Article

      The Joy Of The Illegible

      Sep 1, 2023

      Books I Do Everything I’m Told by Megan Fernandes Tin House Books, 2023 paperback, 104 pages, $16.95 Megan Fernandes’ latest collection of poems, I Do Everything I’m Told, begins with an epigraph from Gwendolyn Brooks: “Sit where the light corrupts y

      6 min read

    • Article

      An Anti-Racist Poetry Reading List

      Jun 8, 2020

      These recent poetry collections offer poignant narratives and snapshots of racial injustice in America. The post An Anti-Racist Poetry Reading List appeared first on The Millions.

      1 min read

    • Article

      My Son Is Undone by My Hair

      Dec 1, 2021

      I mean he buries his face in itand breathes it in, holds it with his little handlike an elephant as I carry himpost-nap, still halfway in a dream. I mean he asks to brush it, then doesfor ten minutes—hours at two—gently. Says again and again Mama,

      1 min read

    • Article

      José Donoso Saw the Future of Latin American Literature

      Nov 21, 2023

      American readers have largely forgotten the single greatest writer to come from the Latin American Boom: Chilean novelist José Donoso. The post José Donoso Saw the Future of Latin American Literature appeared first on The Millions.

      5 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for I Love Information

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      I Love Information - Courtney Bush

      WHEN YOU GET TO SPARTA VOICE

      I do not want to be crazy 

      about the circle whose center is everywhere.

      The metallic parts of mind drawn to an image of the spill,

      one that goes wine and wine and more wine. A friend is gone

      and I wanted to be all blade, too scary to use.

      Where the intuitive paths people took before us

      rubbed the grass away from the dirt at the top corner of the park,

      what’s wrong with you?

      You seemed combinedly possessed by every robin that fell.

      I am expected to write about the art I’ve been looking at.

      Well the story in Wagner was only the summary of a story.

      In summer I arrived at the idea of entering sacred time recklessly

      as it regarded the way men interpreted the behaviors of my friend Jessa and me.

      We walked home from Del Taco saying you snap, then I’ll snap.

      She pulled her tampon out behind the dumpster while the Scientology cross burned.

      The strongest member of our party had gone overboard.

      Of course not everything is about that.

      To yellow-haired Helen, I really liked you, I thought you were amazing.

      The way you threw away the pretty napkin we got with the takeout.

      The little cockroach on the lip of the stove then the lip of the sink

      going around the whole room with complete freedom.

      I wanted you to be happy like that, where I could see you

      and my sight at times had no limit. As a visionary I was a loser.

      My spinal cord always filled up with whatever chemicals felt like

      the other world had already rejected me.

      If you give me the chance, I’ll hold the handful of egret feathers by the gate,

      wave long goodbye, smile with teeth like lemon seeds, I don’t care, at this point,

      I understand exactly half of everything.

      In Los Angeles there was fake blood ponding in the ring. There was someone cool

      to drink the blood. A dove drunk on mulberries. There was the underworld

      of learning which is not beautiful, not the ugly beauty of a model even.

      There was instead a path of decimation upon which all you could do was submit.

      LATE PREAMBLE 

      My thing that year

      was believing in things

      There would be a lost pilot

      An internal logic in each event

      It was easy with the children. We found money for Elsa from Frozen. Plastic chess pieces gathered in arrangements on the floor. Ten of the kids piled scarves over the bodies of the two smallest as they lay on the floor playing dead. A pink then a red scarf fell. They told me as I approached, before I even asked

      These are our bodies and we said it was okay.

      When the adults showed me in word and action what they cared about, it was harder to imagine there was some internal logic strong enough to believe in, but I did it.

      I was the dad who can sing

      Pain is the lost pilot

      and I was the lost pilot

      and I was the person 

      who had come a long way

      with arms outstretched 

      from the famous poem

      and I was the cowboy 

      and that year turned into many years

      KATELYN

      1

      Fucked-up Greek movie on Easter Sunday

      Mulberries made the doves drunk

      Kite’s foot was a reedlike grass

      How are you supposed to be survived

      Grief does not make us weaker

      But it might not make us strong like they said

      I love when celebrities cry on Instagram

      Like I love my first love

      And life in my eyes then outside them

      My house dying for the Lord to come

      In the form of a nonlinear accumulation

      In the synopsis you are described as a vulnerable screenwriter

      But you tried to strangle the fiancé you proposed to yesterday

      When I couldn’t hear the sink running

      Singing so loud in the shower I’ll fly away in the morning

      If I die Hallelujah by and

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1