English as a second language and other poems / Jaswinder Bolina.

Intro -- Title Page -- Note to the Reader -- Dedication -- Epigraph -- Contents -- English as a Second Language -- ≈ -- Americanastan -- Ancestral Poem -- House Hunters International -- Second City Autumnal -- ≈ -- House Hunters -- A Poem, like the Soul, Which Can't Be Translated (or Oak Park Elegy) -- The Apology Factory -- A Freudian Elegy -- A Story about the Antichrist -- ≈ -- Mar-a-Lago-a-Mar -- Once Upon a Toilet over the Alps (or Executive Platinum Elegy) -- Modern Ark -- Elegy for a Dog -- ≈ -- Waiting My Turn -- The Living Daylights (or A Passage to Indiana) -- A Film Noir for Joseph Stiglitz -- Terrible Elegy -- ≈ -- The Billy Graham Elegy -- All His Fascist Wants -- Self-Portrait in a Baby Monitor -- A Little Slice of Heaven -- Desert Rose -- ≈ -- Bird, Elegy -- Hidden Valley Ranch -- The Bad News: A Film Noir -- The Plague on TV -- Quarantine Bardo -- ≈ -- The Apartment (or The Jesus Elegy) -- Actual Elegy -- The Old Country -- Palace of Amenhotep (or 20th Century Elegy) -- ≈ -- Iguana Variations in Winter -- At War with the Cynics -- Lines Composed Upon Changing a Diaper -- Probable Poem for the Furious Infant -- ≈ -- The Usual Entertainment -- About the Author -- Books by Jaswinder Bolina -- Acknowledgments -- Copyright -- Special Thanks

Warm tenderness and fiery critique sit side-by-side in Bolina's English as A Second Language, a collection that skewers, laments, and celebrates America with intelligence, humility, and a disarming sense of humor. In Jaswinder Bolina's English as A Second Language and Other Poems, we are asked to imagine the tender and harsh realities of this world within a single breath-- a Steiff monkey resting next to a child in a crib and the tired hands of "a thousand /women in Sidi Bouzid" assembling the stuffed animal. Coated in an armor of wit and humor and steeped in the idiosyncrasies of language, English as a Second Language pits sentimentality against cynicism and the personal against the national. What remains is the kaleidoscopic image of the modern American condition. From elegy to persona, wide-ranging poems tell the story of a child of immigrants becoming a parent against the tumultuous backdrop of our politics and culture. Where the collection asks, "What chance do any of us have?," the poet finds hope, possibility. Bolina's musical poems zip across time, challenging the fixity of the book. Clues offer the possibility of an alternate reading, where backwards, a new emotional arc appears--dreamlike, the nostalgic origin story of a sleep-deprived parent tracing a path through language and history. Forwards, backwards, English as a Second Language skewers, laments, and celebrates America with intelligence and humility. -- Provided by publisher.