ABOUT THIS BOOK

An exposed and exposing collection of poetry on inherited trauma, chronic illness, and the American South

Velvet, the second full-length collection from award-winning poet William Fargason, explores chronic illness, patriarchal abuse, intergenerational trauma, and racial inequality in the American South. Its speaker moves through the generations that preceded him to understand himself, and to heal from traumas both inherited and lived. As part of that heritage, the speaker confronts a family history of participation in racist ideologies and organizations to make sense of his own place within, and responsibility to, this history. In the titular lyric essay, “Velvet,” Fargason braids scientific research and YouTube videos in an attempt to forge paths for healing while contending with an inherited chronic disease. Ultimately, Velvet argues against traditional forms of toxic masculinity and suggests that vulnerability, soft and bleeding as the velvet on a deer’s antlers, offers one solution to it.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

WILLIAM FARGASON is the author of Love Song to the Demon-Possessed Pigs of Gadara (University of Iowa Press, 2020), winner of the 2019 Iowa Poetry Prize. His poetry has appeared in Ploughshares, The Threepenny Review, Prairie Schooner, New England Review, Narrative, and elsewhere. His nonfiction has appeared in Brevity, The Offing, and elsewhere. He lives with himself in Towson, Maryland.

REVIEWS

“William Fargason’s poems glimmer with grit and tenderness. Largely focused on the speaker’s relationship with his father, Velvet not only reckons with the violence we’ve inherited; these poems imagine how we might emerge from the ashes of the past, to start again, to have a voice, despite the abuses of toxic masculinity and the struggles of mental and physical illness. With lyrical mastery, rich narratives, and heightened vulnerability, Velvet is an intense and moving second collection.” —Marianne Chan, author of All Heathens— -

“In Velvet, Will Fargason masterfully writes toward and away from the intergenerational trauma the speaker of these poems is so familiar with—trauma carried in the body. The writing is sensory, musical, and full of a profound longing that avoids sentimentality or cliché. Fargason offers us a tender, self-reflective, vulnerable, and nuanced exploration of masculinity—critical and at once aware of its pervasive aspects at the personal and cultural levels.” —Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach, author of 40 Weeks— -

"At times, as in these lines from “That Summer at Seaside”, in which the speaker refers to towels the speaker laid out, in the midst of a mental health crisis, to absorb rain, William Fargason's voice rises to a great and surprising lyric intensity: “the damp towels crumpled across the floor / a field of sleeping newborns.” At other times, his voice is clear and direct—so bare one feels one ought not to be hearing what one is hearing. Always his poems are essential. Velvet is further evidence of a talent to be watched, to be read, to be heard."—Shane McCrae, author of The Many Hundreds of the Scent— -

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

I
House Made of Guns
Apology
That Summer at Seaside
Punch List, 1994
Gasoline
A Silverfish in the Childhood
Open House
Ankylosing Spondylitis as Conductor and Brakeman
Tracing the Pain
Sonnet with Chronic Illness
River
Ode to Klonopin
People as Seasons as People
Aim
Ars Poetica
Vox
When My Father Tells Me to Move on Already
Arrowhead

II
Ark
Elegy with Steam
Elegy with My Great-Grandmother’s Piano
Letter
First Plea
Waterline
Sonnet with Bare Branches
Flare-Up
Family Reunion
Ekphrasis in Alberta, Alabama
Elegy with a Hurricane
Velvet
When My Father Tells Me I Had a Great Childhood

III
Sonnet of Little Faith
Elegy on the Whole
The Morning of the Most Recent Shooting I Saw
Alabama, 2004
Elegy with Teeth
When My Alabama
When the Cop Tells Us
Elegy with a Wavelength of Sound
Notes on Depression
When My Brother Tells Me I’m Obsessed with Sadness
Seaside Meditation
On Dishes and My Father
When My Friend Tells Me My Father Doesn’t Seem That Bad
Admission with a Thousand Dead Birds
On the Way to the Reading
Ode to the Pillars of the Overpass Bridge
Ode to My Pectus Excavatum
Nesting
Elegy for Another Late-Night Phone Call

Notes
Thank Yous

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