The Complete Cinnamon Bay Sonnets

Overview
Excerpts

by Andrew Kaufman

I love these poems. The exact origins of the sonnet, I believe, are lost in the mists of time, but anonymous got it right: 8--volta (voltage)--6. And so does Kaufman with these lush, tender, heart-shredding examples of the form sung at its finest register.

—Thomas Lux

Andrew Kaufman’s The Complete Cinnamon Bay Sonnets bear powerful witness to “the last loneliness” of the lost, the forsaken, the outcast, the humiliated, the downtrodden. Divided between the almost paradisiacal Virgin Islands and a New York City Central Booking cell, the poet offers his nightmare flashbacks/angelic visions. “Swimming in wonder,” deafened by “the screaming sirens of pure pain,” he evokes “the intifada of the heart.” “Yo! Professor,” his cellmates implore him, “We’re all sad. Tell us a poem.” Echoing the Psalmist’s “How can I sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?” with brave urgency he responds : “I am here – and writing. Please listen.”

—L.S. Asekoff

What I have always admired about Andrew Kaufman's poetry is how insistent he is about not settling for anything easy in his poems, and for how he stays with each poem until he's made it be the most that it can be. His embrace of the English line in this collection is illustrative of the poet's deep insights into what prosody is and can be and should not be. He understands too what all good metrical poets understand: that you don't sacrifice the language to satisfy the demands of the form; you do the opposite. The result is a funky music that seems to this reader as totally appropriate for our times. These sonnets are mini-dramas that link up to form the story of an American life told in rich, playful, deeply abiding language that sounds like the voices of our country, yet focuses specifically on a single incident and its ramifications. Brilliant.

—Bruce Weigl

Andrew Kaufman grew up near NYC, graduated from Oberlin College, earned his MFA in poetry writing from Brooklyn College, and his MA and Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Toronto. His Cinnamon Bay Sonnets won the Center for Book Arts chapbook competition, and was followed by Earth's Ends, winner of the Pearl Poetry Award, and Both Sides of the Niger. His poems have appeared in numerous journals. He is the recipient of two Pushcart Poetry nominations and an NEA award. He has taught writing and literature at a number of colleges and universities, and has traveled extensively in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. He currently lives in New York City.

by Andrew Kaufman

Calabash, mahoe, sea grapes, and manchineel
are trees I learned from Skoka Zumi, who brought
us, unasked, each day what fruits or flowers he might
buy conversation with, and an excuse to steal

toward us when we walked the beach in the moonlight
or dawn I love. Filth crusted, with hints
of dreadlocks, solicitude, and an account
that switched from growing up near the next

beach on a dirt floor, to an orphanage
he escaped in Kenya, to jumping a merchant
ship in Port Said, his patois changed

to New York street slang. And all this
for what? If kingdom come, and hand join hand
in starlight, the lost will still be lost.

Under starlight the lost are no less lost--
the ones half sane, frozen and starved in silence
so long they can't be found by the police
who kidnapped them, their arctic shacks lost in blizzards

of vanished papers. Or the one they dragged
from the barn past midnight who was found
punching a dead horse. And those lost
closer to home, haunting high school reunions

to convince classmates they have changed
after twenty years. Even in starlight—
the one banging on cell bars in code

remains lost, dreaming a rumor will start,
whispered, from one cell to the next—
I am here— and writing. Please listen.

I am here now and writing--please listen,
is how the clear-eyed, peasant-bloused girl I once met
above a tarn and failed to talk past kissing
while we lay under the stars late that night,

began the letter, which, out of nowhere, came—
months afterward from the "spiritual center"
that turned out to be the New Hampshire home
of Reverend Moon's church. And two years later

it was she who startled me out of blankness
on a Manhattan street corner: No — forget
about the donation -- it's me, Denise,

and it was, until two men in suits led her
away, something unspeakably human that breathed,
startled, standing naked in clear water.