Table of Contents

Barely Wept

Marginalia

Pariah

Patricide in C Minor

Patricide in C Minor

Patricide in C Minor

Am I Offended

Patricide in C Minor

Patricide in C Minor

Patricide in C Minor

That’s How I Spin

Patricide in C Minor

Beating Around the Bush

Patricide in C Minor

Historical (Abstracts in) Couplets

Swarm

Patricide in C Minor

Patricide in C Minor

Realism

Patricide in C Minor

Patricide in C Minor

The Pyramid

Patricide in C Minor

Naturalism, or In the Cathedral of Decadence

Patricide in C Minor

Patricide in C Minor

Fly Patrol

Lap Toy

Patricide in C Minor

Against “Against Content”

Resistance

Patricide in C Minor

Bulletin from the Cognoscenti of Fashion

Patricide in C Minor

Patricide in C Minor

Instructions for Old Poets, or How to Become Laureate

Patricide in C Minor

Patricide in C Minor

Intro to Lit

Patricide in C Minor

Patricide in C Minor

Adorno on the Gold Coast

Patricide in C Minor

Inevitably, Perhaps

Patricide in C Minor

Patricide in C Minor

The Invitation

Leaving Leaving Behind

Patricide in C Minor

Exactly Like the Time Before

Patricide in C Minor

Less Boat Than Wave

Patricide in C Minor

Irksome

Patricide in C Minor

Patricide in C Minor

Re: Serpents and Related Procedures

Patricide in C Minor

Patricide in C Minor

Ode on the Road

Twisted Chemistry

Patricide in C Minor

American Incident

Patricide in C Minor

Patricide in C Minor

In the Interest of Precision

In Prison

A Man, His Dog, and Some Fish: An Aubade

The Myrmecological Life

As a Bug Preens

Patricide in C Minor

On the Receiving End

Patricide in C Minor

Abortive Effort

To Boat Five

Patricide in C Minor

Patricide in C Minor

Patricide in C Minor

Part My Oatmeal Bath To Locate

Art at Alba

Thrift

Patricide in C Minor

Central Heating Meal Ticket

Into the Afternoon

`Not Very, Sir’

Patricide in C Minor

Tears (for the Astronaut)

Patricide in C Minor

Tough Guy

Patricide in C Minor

Unclean Aubade

Boil Vigorously

Patricide in C Minor

Still Life(less) With Tapeworm

Liposuction

Patricide in C Minor

Society’s Way of Telling You To Act More Feminine Is the Constant Urge To Cross Your Legs

Discrete Mathematics

With a Certain Decorum

In the Panopticon of the Barely Salaried

Patricide in C Minor

Patricide in C Minor

Still Life With Duct Tape

Landscape With Pitchfork

Suburban Yuletide

Patricide in C Minor

Nile

Patricide in C Minor

A Piece of Bird

Time’s Eunuch

I Lost My Tooth on the Way to Plymouth (Rock)

It’s Either Snowing

Patricide in C Minor

Patricide in C Minor

Along the Perimeter

Taking Lessons from the Stone Head

Patricide in C Minor

The Worse You Treat Him

About the Author

Brian Henry is a U.S. poet, translator, editor, and critic. The author of nine books of poetry, he has received numerous honors for his work, including the Best Translated Book Award, the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, a translation fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a grant from the Slovenian Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has co-edited the journal Verse since 1995, and his criticism has appeared in such publications as the Times Literary Supplement and New York Times Book Review. He translated Woods and Chalices by Tomaž Šalamun and The Book of Things by Aleš Šteger.

Reviews

Reading American Incident is an exciting, deeply unsettling experience. Few poets have Brian Henry’s eye and ear for the gridlock of everyday life in America today, where “A warning light is flashing on the dashboard: / we need tax relief now,” and the suburban front porch turns out to be the setting for the “Patricide” series – paragraphs that use a whiplash effect to dramatize the intractibility of our daily problems. But Henry’s satiric thrust is by no means condescending: his malice is directed at himself as well as everyone else. American Incident is brilliant, funny, reckless: one of the best books of poetry I've come across in a long time.
*Marjorie Perloff*

This capacious third volume from a much-remarked young poet-critic offers versatility, up-to-the-minute references, and edgy verbal fireworks framed by a remarkable range of forms.… The volume represents an advance on Henry’s previous poetry not only in its startling quantity, but also in its quality: it will match, and perhaps extend, his growing transatlantic reputation.
*Publishers Weekly*

Henry’s wildly comprehensive lexicon and stylistic bag of tricks take us traveling through traditional and experimental poetic worlds.… Few poems today induce aesthetic delirium and delight like Henry’s best.
*American Letters & Commentary *

The real subject of Amercan Incident is violence – familial, political, and especially sexual. the idea of violence, threats of violence, and acts of violence run through virtually all the selections here, but are nowhere more obvious than in “Patricide in C Minor,” where that violence extends to the text in ways perhaps more unsettling to readerly expectations than descriptions of broken bodies.
*West Branch*

Henry is a keen observer who writes from a constantly changing perspective, often employing the techniques of montage and catalogue and typically eschewing a fixed point of view.
*Jacket Magazine*