...we are fixed to perpetrate the species-- I meant perpetuate--as if our duty? were coupled with our terror. As if beauty itself were but a syllabus of errors. Troy Jollimore's first collection of poems won the National Book Critics Circle Award, was hailed by the New York Times as "a snappy, entertaining book," and led the San Francisco Chronicle to call him "a new and exciting voice in American poetry." And his critically acclaimed second collection expanded his reputation for poems that often take a playful approach to philosophical issues. While the poems in Syllabus of Errors share recognizable concerns with those of Jollimore's first two books, readers will also find a voice that has grown more urgent, more vulnerable, and more sensitive to both the inevitability of tragedy and the possibility of renewal. Poems such as "Ache and Echo," "The Black-Capped Chickadees of Martha's Vineyard," and "When You Lift the Avocado to Your Mouth" explore loss, regret, and the nature of beauty, while the culminating long poem, "Vertigo," is an elegy for a lost friend as well as a fantasia on death, repetition, and transcendence (not to mention the poet's favorite Hitchcock film). Ingeniously organized into sections that act as reflections on six quotations about birdsong, these poems are themselves an answer to the question the poet asks in "On Birdsong": "What would we say to the cardinal or jay, / given wings that could mimic their velocities?"

Table of Contents:
On Birdsong 3 Inventory 4 Ache and Echo 5 On the Origins of Things 11 Critique of Judgment 12 Homer 13 Oriole 15 Past Imperfect 16 II ON BEAUTY On Beauty 23 Syllabus of Errors 24 Cutting Room 26 My Book 29 Going Viral 30 Bone 32 Possession 35 Death by Landscape 36 Second Wind 37 The Black-Capped Chickadees of Martha's Vineyard 38 III ON BLINDNESS On Blindness 43 The Apples 45 Charlie Brown 47 Some Men 49 The Proselytizers 51 Universal 52 Photograph 54 Polaroid Model 1000 OneStep, Circa 1978 55 Ars Poetica 57 The New Joys 59 IV WHEN YOU LIFT THE AVOCADO TO YOUR MOUTH Tamara 63 The Task 64 More Broken than Yours 66 Fireworks 68 Lament 69 The Fourteen-Hour Orgasm 71 Not Enough 72 Poem for the Abandoned Titan Missile Silos Just North of Chico, California 76 Autumn Day (after Rilke) 77 The Small Rain 78 When You Lift the Avocado to Your Mouth 79 V VERTIGO Vertigo 83 VI CONCLUDING UNSCIENTIFIC POSTSCRIPT [maybe I just need time to grieve] 95 Notes and Acknowledgments 97