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Distributed for Oberlin College Press

Vanitas Motel

Things happen in Vanitas Motel: a funeral, a fistfight, an outburst at a poetry reading. Its poems are surreal parables, at once funny and dark, sensual and deeply serious. Their revealed subjects are loss, art, illness and desire. Vanitas Motel is the first collection by Jon Loomis, and the winner of the 1997 FIELD Poetry Prize.

79 pages | 6 x 9 | © 1998

Poetry


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Table of Contents

Playing Seven Card Stud with the Men of My Wife’s Family • In the Next Life • Past Lives • Hypochondria • Bathers • The Patience of the Muse • My Bourgeois Life • Visitation • Vanitas Motel • Aubade at Your Hospital Window • Insomnia • Sleep • Hospital • The Epileptic • Overnight in the Cardiac Unit • The Peas • Desire • Buzzards • Last Days • Trompe l’Oeil • Communion • Ohio • Portrait of My Father as Van Gogh • Giverny, 1926 • Common Prayer • My Third World • Midwest Confessional • The Last Castrato • Watching Wings of Desire with a Bad Cold • Church Street • In the Lutheran Nursing Home, Aunt Flora Tells Two Stories • Outer Cape Vanitas • November Letter to Provincetown • Oysters • Adultery • Illness • Beach Point Aubade • Leaving the Metro • In the Year of the Great Flood • Good Friday • Easter • The Day of the Comet • Dog Nights • The Way • Arrhythmia • Separation • Divorce • A REading at the Art Colony • Notes • Acknowlegments

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