Saturn Returns a new poetry collection by Charline Tetiyevsky
At turns heartbreaking and punishingly funny, this latest collection of poems by Charline "Charlie" Tetiyevsky explores the astrological concept of the Saturnic return, a heralding of adulthood signaled by the roughly 30-year path that Saturn takes to travel around the sun from someone's date of birth. By setting the collection within the astrological frameworks by which some millennials and their ancestors have found meaning, Tetiyevsky suggests that poetry, like astrology, can at its best work as a cross-generational cipher.
The first full-length book of poetry from the author of Things to Keep the Living Alive, Saturn Returns is an experimental, occasionally ironic examination of quarter-life love and loss filtered through the hectic, dissociatively digital culture of the nascent space age.
About the BookSaturn ReturnsPoetry, First Edition (January 2023)84 pagesSoftcover with color cover54 poemsFeatures B&W archival photographs of Saturn and its moons by NASA
ExcerptsThe Day The Teenagers on the Train Dressed Like We Did in 4th GradeIt was that hazy see-thru mesh crop top with the digital print of the Birth of Venus that aged me.I was like, damn, where'd the time go?Remember when all of the computers were supposed to shut down, shit, do I wish they had done it, shit, do I wish every last pager and bubble-backed Mac had all gone blackand the clocks had all turned to blink 00:00:00 and:00 and:00 forever til the light made us sick and we turned off the boxesand we threw away the monitors we piled them high in a landfill with all our other open embarrassments, and while we cracked a book we exhaled hard and said sheesh, we saidshit, that was close, like, damn, didn't we almost nearly turn our spines into themselves like a nautilus, like an ouroboros didn't we almost swallow our own feet just to spite our mouths?
THIS IS YOUR CAPTAIN SPEAKINGThis is a book of poems about the methane horizon and how the expanse of unknowable solitude behind it is peppered with dead stars that persist only in photo-memories.This is a book of poems for the people, except!<