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Filibuster to Delay a Kiss: And Other Poems
Family was a whitewashed, / milk-toothed word / that couldn’t account for the mother / who wept and burnt / the roast if the floor was dirty– / or if it was Tuesday, or there were clouds.
Written in an eloquent and searingly honest voice, these poems address the pain and pleasure of growing up. Courtney Queeney tells intense emotional truths in poetry that is at once personal and universal. She exposes the rawness of a complicated relationship with her mother–She mothered the disorder in me, / this difficulty getting out of bed / and dressing like a real human adult, / trying not to be her daughter–and her attitude toward love expresses both profound longing and erotic I translate love from the hush of a hung-up phone / before a body comes to engage me for an hour. And Queeney writes with humor and self-doubt of the conflict between desire and the quest to remain true to oneself–I will fly around the world on an airplane until I arrive at calm. / I will spend my days suspended in air, manufacturing a closure.
Filibuster to Delay a Kiss sounds a new and distinctive note in the symphony of young American poets.
Written in an eloquent and searingly honest voice, these poems address the pain and pleasure of growing up. Courtney Queeney tells intense emotional truths in poetry that is at once personal and universal. She exposes the rawness of a complicated relationship with her mother–She mothered the disorder in me, / this difficulty getting out of bed / and dressing like a real human adult, / trying not to be her daughter–and her attitude toward love expresses both profound longing and erotic I translate love from the hush of a hung-up phone / before a body comes to engage me for an hour. And Queeney writes with humor and self-doubt of the conflict between desire and the quest to remain true to oneself–I will fly around the world on an airplane until I arrive at calm. / I will spend my days suspended in air, manufacturing a closure.
Filibuster to Delay a Kiss sounds a new and distinctive note in the symphony of young American poets.
- GenresPoetry
96 pages, Hardcover
First published June 12, 2007
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
March 12, 2018
This book blew away from the very first page. First line:
'Because you are not dead, I will continue to visit you'
Bold and intense, just the way I like my poetry :) Her poems are bursting with reckless backbone and masterpieces on insomnia. The writing is spectacular. And she's got a lot to say about her mother ;)
'I just want to write, once:
When she died I lost my fear
that I would inherit her shadow,
thread on my mother's madness
sleeve by narrow sleeve. I just want you
buried, silenced under the gravity of dirt.'
-From 'Elegy for My Mother'
'Because you are not dead, I will continue to visit you'
Bold and intense, just the way I like my poetry :) Her poems are bursting with reckless backbone and masterpieces on insomnia. The writing is spectacular. And she's got a lot to say about her mother ;)
'I just want to write, once:
When she died I lost my fear
that I would inherit her shadow,
thread on my mother's madness
sleeve by narrow sleeve. I just want you
buried, silenced under the gravity of dirt.'
-From 'Elegy for My Mother'
August 18, 2011
Here are some very beautiful damaged goods.
February 18, 2011
Intense and rather heavy - if not disturbing - but I was completely sucked in. There were many beautiful phrases. It's largely about painful relationships with family, partners and herself. I read all the poems in one sitting and will likely read them many more times in the future.
August 26, 2016
Dark. Painful. After reviewing her bio. and some info. online, including her acquisition of a MFA and various accolades, I wonder if she's writing for relief of past experiences or for shock effect. I don't know enough of her work or life to make that determination.
August 23, 2007
I am extremely biased because I taught Courtney when she was in high school and she remains one of the two most talented writers I have ever come across, but I have to agree with Billy Collins, who says on the back cover blurb that the poems in this book are both "gritty" and "lyrical," two words that simply leap into my head when I remember the pieces that Courtney brought to me during our multitudinous conferences a decade or so ago.
This is not a book to be inhaled voraciously; there is too much depth, too much detail, too much power in her words and imagery. The poems in this book are meant to linger over, to let them seep into your soul through the pores of your skin and become part of you.
Courtney's inaugural volume weaves together an intricately and delicately patterned quilt of word paintings that allow the reader, with an openness and candor that would be refreshing if its cumulative impact were not so horrifying, to see the impact on her life of her painful youth, personal struggles, and a mother who emerges in the very first poem as the epitome of dysfunction, as well as confused and misdirected searches for identity. All of these themes are (so sadly) universally comprehensible. And Courtney's voice, already so beautiful in high school, is especially poignant in its shoot-from-the-hip bluntness and its charged imagery.
Her mother's myriad parenting failures are a recurring theme in the book. One stunning poem, "All My Mothers," walks the reader through the schizophrenic personality changes Courtney associates with her mother, whose character evokes memories of just about every emotion but happiness:
"My happy mother is caught in yellowing photographs
and died when I was born
but a restless one still prowls the static on my phone."
All of this confusion has apparently left the poet with a less than perfectly healthy self-image. A recurring title device casts her as the "Anti-Leading Lady" of her own life story. Her exploits with men make it clear that she has viewed sex (and men) as empty, disposable and meaningless experiences. In the title poem she "filibusters" by speaking incessantly about anything that pops into her mind including the contents of a cereal box and a list of the noble gases just to "delay a kiss," though whether the kiss might be a sincere one we never know. Maybe nothing at all is sincere.
Still, Courtney's humor shines through persistently and her stunningly beautiful images leap out and grab us. In "Saint Mother," she derisively refers to her mother's "church" as "Our Lady of Guilt For Escaping the Tar Paper Polack Shacks" and "Our Lady of the Evil Aside." In "The Anti-Leading Lady's Self-Defense," a poem about dysfunction in love that begins "Once upon a time I fell in love--an accident with injuries," she still manages to come up with a stanza that can arrest the reader with its beauty:
"Today it rained and even the garbage
in the courtyard looked scrubbed,
and the neighbor's windowsill row of sunflowers
stretched their necks to the sun, dripping,
and I could have loved anyone at all, forever"
Of course, the next line negates this sentiment: "for a half-hour."
But that does nothing to negate the brilliance of Courtney's writing. Her sly, self-derogatory verses mingle with those in which she excoriates her mother so that by the end of the volume we begin to sense that even Courtney does not know how to separate her search for self-worth from her need for some kind of closure with her mother.
The final poem, "The Light," at first seems an odd choice, being about neither of the two central themes. However, in its simple recounting of a painful inflamed thyroid when she was thirteen, Courtney manages to leave the reader with the understanding that pain and suffering do end, and while we seek their resolutions we remind ourselves that we are waiting for "the glow" of "myself the light at the end of the tunnel."
This is not a book to be inhaled voraciously; there is too much depth, too much detail, too much power in her words and imagery. The poems in this book are meant to linger over, to let them seep into your soul through the pores of your skin and become part of you.
Courtney's inaugural volume weaves together an intricately and delicately patterned quilt of word paintings that allow the reader, with an openness and candor that would be refreshing if its cumulative impact were not so horrifying, to see the impact on her life of her painful youth, personal struggles, and a mother who emerges in the very first poem as the epitome of dysfunction, as well as confused and misdirected searches for identity. All of these themes are (so sadly) universally comprehensible. And Courtney's voice, already so beautiful in high school, is especially poignant in its shoot-from-the-hip bluntness and its charged imagery.
Her mother's myriad parenting failures are a recurring theme in the book. One stunning poem, "All My Mothers," walks the reader through the schizophrenic personality changes Courtney associates with her mother, whose character evokes memories of just about every emotion but happiness:
"My happy mother is caught in yellowing photographs
and died when I was born
but a restless one still prowls the static on my phone."
All of this confusion has apparently left the poet with a less than perfectly healthy self-image. A recurring title device casts her as the "Anti-Leading Lady" of her own life story. Her exploits with men make it clear that she has viewed sex (and men) as empty, disposable and meaningless experiences. In the title poem she "filibusters" by speaking incessantly about anything that pops into her mind including the contents of a cereal box and a list of the noble gases just to "delay a kiss," though whether the kiss might be a sincere one we never know. Maybe nothing at all is sincere.
Still, Courtney's humor shines through persistently and her stunningly beautiful images leap out and grab us. In "Saint Mother," she derisively refers to her mother's "church" as "Our Lady of Guilt For Escaping the Tar Paper Polack Shacks" and "Our Lady of the Evil Aside." In "The Anti-Leading Lady's Self-Defense," a poem about dysfunction in love that begins "Once upon a time I fell in love--an accident with injuries," she still manages to come up with a stanza that can arrest the reader with its beauty:
"Today it rained and even the garbage
in the courtyard looked scrubbed,
and the neighbor's windowsill row of sunflowers
stretched their necks to the sun, dripping,
and I could have loved anyone at all, forever"
Of course, the next line negates this sentiment: "for a half-hour."
But that does nothing to negate the brilliance of Courtney's writing. Her sly, self-derogatory verses mingle with those in which she excoriates her mother so that by the end of the volume we begin to sense that even Courtney does not know how to separate her search for self-worth from her need for some kind of closure with her mother.
The final poem, "The Light," at first seems an odd choice, being about neither of the two central themes. However, in its simple recounting of a painful inflamed thyroid when she was thirteen, Courtney manages to leave the reader with the understanding that pain and suffering do end, and while we seek their resolutions we remind ourselves that we are waiting for "the glow" of "myself the light at the end of the tunnel."
July 23, 2013
I loved this book. I think I discovered Courtney's work on the Poetry Foundation's site and was immediately drawn in. It's a courageous book, gritty and lyrical. If you like the work of Kara Candito, Anna Journey, Ashley Capps, and Dorothea Lasky (as I do) I think you'll like Courtney's work.
February 22, 2020
Filibuster to Delay a Kiss has such a strong vision but is far too angsty for me to appreciate. Queeney obviously has some talent as a poet—her dicion, assonance, consonance, and the flow of her words create a style that's intentional yet raw and easy to read. I admit that I was hooked at the beginning with "Elegy for My Mother" ("Mother/who whines like a cur/at my back door/begging to be let in." p.4), however, I'm not sure whether it's impressive or disappointing that the author is able to sustain such vitriol throughout the entire book. There are dozens of poems about her mommy issues and her need to have meaningless sex with unidentified, distant "males." There are a couple of other oddball poems, like "Vestigial" which describes a woman vivisecting herself, and "The Current Courtney Ann Queeney" in which she narcissistically refers to herself in the third person. I'm not sure whether she was going for shock value or if she needed a monument for her emotional baggage. Either way, I'm not broken enough for this collection to resonate with me.
Poems that I liked:
"Elegy for My Mother," "Love Song of the Insomniac and the Narcoleptic."
=2/42 (4.8%) poems that I liked.
Poems that I liked:
"Elegy for My Mother," "Love Song of the Insomniac and the Narcoleptic."
=2/42 (4.8%) poems that I liked.
August 26, 2007
I'm still on the fence about this book (perhaps it doesn't help that I read more than half of it in Banjo Jim's waiting for the Bandits gig to start); it probably deserves another read before being harshly judged. There were a few remarkable poems in here ("Confession" & "Problems with the Eye" notably), but the overall effect of the book, the weight of the constant authorial "I," was wearying. Also, Queeney has a few linguistic tics that probably wouldn't be noticed when her poems are spread out over journals in ones and twos, but are very apparent here: nerves and kneecaps appear frequently as shorthand for the mind and body, respectively.
September 22, 2016
Immensely readable and relatable. Most if not all of Courtney Queeney's poems here are about her mother or lovers or both, and can best be summed up by The Anti-Leading Lady's Self-Defense on page 60. "Can someone unloved early and thoroughly / love back? All those studies about infants untouched / by their mothers. The someone is the speaker."
July 22, 2008
To read, at long last, a poet so very near my own age and experience was disturbing, eerie, exciting, and strangely fantastic. Favorites: Saint Mother, Conviction, Filibuster to Delay a Kiss, and Invitation.
August 6, 2008
Some really beautiful lines within this collection. Topics include: lost love, found love, love songs, and the trouble with love.
April 28, 2009
"The flaw with trying to reason
myself free was my brain, both the fault
and the only hold I had."
myself free was my brain, both the fault
and the only hold I had."
September 11, 2014
Readable, but largely forgettable, aside from a few great lines (and title).
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews