Milton’s God Where I-95 meets The Pike, a ponderous thunderhead flowered—
stewed a minute, then flipped like a flash card, tattered edges crinkling in, linings so dark with excessive bright
that, standing, waiting, at the overpass edge, the onlooker couldn’t decide
until the end, or even then, what was revealed and what had been hidden.
Using a variety of forms and achieving a range of musical effects, Nate Klug’s Anyone traces the unraveling of astonishment upon small scenes—natural and domestic, political and religious—across America’s East and Midwest. The book’s title foregrounds the anonymity it seeks through several means: first, through close observation (a concrete saw, a goshawk, a bicyclist); and, second, via translation (satires from Horace and Catullus, and excerpts from Virgil’s Aeneid). Uniquely among contemporary poetry volumes, Anyone demonstrates fluency in the paradoxes of a religious existence: “To stand sometime / outside my faith . . . or keep waiting / to be claimed in it.” Engaged with theology and the classics but never abstruse, all the while the poems remain grounded in the phenomenal, physical world of “what it is to feel: / moods, half moods, / swarming, then darting loose.”
Nate Klug is the author of Rude Woods, a book-length adaptation of Virgil’s Eclogues. A UCC-Congregationalist minister, he has served churches in North Guilford, Connecticut, and Grinnell, Iowa.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Work Conjugations Milton’s God Letter of Introduction, Samuel Palmer to His Patron Thinking The Choice Dusk in Jasper County Home Neighbors To Egnatius, Who Won’t Stop Smiling Jon’s Jog Advent
Parade A Message Lullaby on Election Eve Lost Seasons Shifts In Calico Rock, Arkansas Novitiate Gift Three Days Octonaire on the World’s Vanity and Inconstancy Sound from Sound Sacred Harp Sing, Bethel Primitive Baptist Anyone
Dare Errand Predestination The Truly Fucked Petition The Gladiator Twenty-Something Trail True Love Squirrels Mercy Observer