ABZ Press

Mark Brazaitis is the winner of the 2008 ABZ First Book Poetry Contest. Heather McHugh was the judge. Brazaitis won a prize of $1000.00 and his book will be published May 1, 2009.

The Other Language, a book of poems by Mark Brazaitis, is, appropriately, about language. It's about English and Spanish, as in the title poem; it's about what we say and what we don't, or won't or can't, say; it's about what we can easily find words for and what we cannot. The Other Language is about Guatemala, a country ravaged by a thirty-six-year-long civil war. It's about Brazaitis' encounters in Guatemala, with North Americans as well as Guatemalans, and about what these encounters inspired him to think, feel, and remember. The Other Language is about love and passion. In the Guatemalan poems, the lovers can be equated with the country itself, which, for Brazaitis, is haunting and beautiful and painful to think of leaving. In the latter part of the book, the love poems-written to Brazaitis' wife and daughters-are both lighthearted and exuberant. The Other Language is about loss. It's about the devastating losses war brings. It's about the loss of a country-something Elizabeth Bishop, who also loved Latin America, understood. It's about the death of Brazaitis' father and the loss, or the potential loss, of so much because of global warming. The Other Language is about the redemptive power of words, of poetry, of beautiful language, to captivate people and bring relief. It's about the laughter and playfulness words can engender, whether it's in a monologue by a Prince Charming who has a surprising political and domestic agenda or in a whimsical reflection on what it means to turn forty. It's about the relationship between language and music, and how sound, whether from word or instrument, is sometimes enough to unite us-or at least bring us closer.

Mark Brazaitis is the author of three books of fiction: The River of Lost Voices: Stories from Guatemala, winner of the 1998 Iowa Short Fiction Award; An American Affair: Stories, winner of the 2004 George Garrett Fiction Prize from Texas Review Press; and Steal My Heart. Brazaitis is also a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship

In her Essay-Foreword to the book, contest judge, Heather McHugh writes:

"In a subtle sense, the shape of the book’s overall narrative supplies the rhetorical or formal gesture other writers labor to achieve in individual stanzas and lines:  The poems in the book’s second half recast the explorer’s intuition (of a kinship among strangers) into the settler’s intuition (of the surprising within the familiar)—and thus a chiastic motif informs the collection’s larger rhetoric. 

But Brazaitis isn’t fundamentally concerned with any metapoetic—any focus on aesthetics or the instruments of language, despite the recourse of so many pieces to the mention of the singer’s art.  His fundamental gesture is rather a shape in the meaning, a balance in the larger rhetoric of the narrative:  What brought so much heart to the world now brings so much world to the heart, an exchange that finally informs and enlivens The Other Language. 

The other language (one’s own language, always being learned, it seems) is love’s."

                                                            Heather McHugh

Sample Poems

Here are three poems by Mark Brazaitis from The Other Language: © by Mark Brazaitis

Conversations in War Time

On the patio of El Restaurante Jardín,

we have finished discussing

the job they will not offer me.

Talk turns to recent news:

the American woman, a lawyer, an activist,

married to a Guatemalan guerrillero, seized, missing.

She fears he’s dead, but she wants an accounting.

The governments—ours, theirs—

give her decades of dusty documents

and silence.

“What did she expect?” Diane asks,

swinging her empty beer bottle like a pendulum.

“For Christ sake, she married a guerrilla.

The army is supposed to kill him.”

“Romantic crap,” Greg snaps, spitting his disgust

into the cluster of impatiens beside him.

The tiny flowers have bright red faces,

prettier than the sunburns Diane and Greg wear.

They’ve spent their careers amid this war that isn’t theirs.

I’d like to say, after three years here,

I am unhardened, tender still

with reservations and respect.

A man’s life. A wife’s pain. These ought to matter.

Yet only the night before I stood with Alida on her doorstep,

a three-quarters moon above us,

as she told me how good life was in the early ’80s

when The General held absolute power.

The streets were quiet, safe.

Whoever might cause trouble couldn’t

in the far place they’d been led.

“But the impunity,” I said, “the way the army…”

She turned up her face, and her cheeks

shot back the moonlight.

Was it her beauty that cut short my words,

broke off my breath?

Men have been cowards for less.

Prince Charming’s Confession

I never thought my father would agree

to our marriage. She was, after all,

little more than a servant girl.

But he was eager, as he announced, to see me settle down,

though I think the real reason was because

he suspected my secret

and was desperate to conceal it

in the white smoke of matrimony.

I should have skipped town before my wedding day,

but I figured she, who grew up scrubbing floors,

would want what I wanted:

a top-down revolution,

pearls and porcelain to the peasants,

pitchforks in the hearts of the powdered and pampered,

and would pardon my lack of interest in producing an heir

in exchange for an equal share of power.

But when, on our honeymoon night,

I decried the proletariat’s pain,

she looked at me as if I was a talking mouse.

She cracked a smile and said,

“Come to bed, my liege,

and show me some noblesse oblige.”

I had to plead first-night jitters

and a lingering injury from a polo shot

too close to my groin.

She sulked in satin sheets

as I paced on the patio.

At last, I heard her liberating snores.

With money, it’s easy to flee.

I stopped to pick up Prince Eric

at the border,

though now he tells me he might be bi

and he kind of, sort of, sometimes misses Ariel,

despite her briny smell.

Back home, Cinderella’s turned tyrant;

her old lady’s in jail, she ordered her step-sisters guillotined.

My old man is living out his twilight in a cottage

behind the castle.

She has him over for tea on Tuesdays,

to pick his mind on affairs of state,

and while she treats him with the respect

an ex-monarch in his dotage deserves,

she can’t help but joke about his misfortune.

She told him she wouldn’t call herself queen.

She was saving the title, she said,

for me.

But what do I care?

I’m sitting by the pool, I’m drinking a daiquiri,

and here comes Lancelot,

shedding his knight’s hosiery

and giving me the eye.

You tell me: Who has the fairy tale ending?

Wine

But the news isn’t all bad.

Global warming, the Discovery Channel

informs us, makes certain wines taste better,

which means that in twenty years

we might all be vintners. And if grapes are

all we’ll be able to grow (on our roofs,

as the deluge swirls around us), well,

if you had to pick one fruit—or vegetable, even—

to live on for the rest of your life,

wouldn’t you pick the grape? All right,

so I’ll miss apples, oranges, pears, and plums.

I’ll miss carrots and cucumbers

and the occasional mouthful of spinach.

But raise your hand if you’ll mourn Brussel sprouts.

Our economy will be entirely wine-based,

with taxes paid in fluid ounces.

Drunk driving laws will have to be revised, of course.

And the drinking age will be lowered

to three.

This is a future we should celebrate:

A wine bar in every house,

every house a wine bar!

Lift your glasses, let us toast—

to wine!

And let’s drink again—

to wine!

And again—

and again!

You see: Before long, we won’t remember

what we’re missing.