All Faculty Excerpts
Last Supper of the Senses
Gotham Poetry teacher Dean Kostos has recently come out with a new poetry collection, Last Supper of the Senses (Spuyten Duyvil). Praising the collection, poet Alfred Corn notes, “The poetry of sensation arises at the intersection of world, nerve ending, and language. Dean Kostos is a carnivalesque wizard on all three fronts.” Such wizardry is on full display in “Vertigo Torque,” one of the poems in the collection, a work inspired by the classic Hitchcock film Vertigo.
Vertigo Torque
"There is no terror in a bang,
only in the anticipation of it."
—Alfred Hitchcock
While dangers threaten to enthrall,
the space below vaults up and beckons:
Resist the leap, but not the fall.
What no one told her, braced against the wall,
was how the bell tower darkened.
While dangers threatened to enthrall,
its stairs writhed up into the spiral
of Madeleine’s chignon. The last steps taken:
She resisted the leap, but not the fall.
What no one told Scotty, in museum halls,
was that he'd fallen for a painting—and broken.
While dangers threatened to enthrall,
the woman's hazy past had scrawled
a portrait he would try to reckon.
He resisted the leap, but not the fall.
is vortex: we fight its torque, but weaken
—while dangers threaten to enthrall—
resisting the leap, but not the fall.
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To read the more of Dean's poetry, look for Last Supper of the Senses at bn.com.
Copyright © by Dean Kostos. Reprinted by permission of Spuyten Duyvil Publishing. All rights reserved.
