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SOME EXITS TRAVIS CEBULA

Some Exits

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A sample of SOME EXITS by Travis Cebula. Cebula's poetry is a visual and auditory convocation of images, a celebration of sight and sound both beautiful and tragic at once. From 'interstate to pasture,' an adventure awaits you in SOME EXITS.

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Page 1: Some Exits

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SOME EXITS

TRAVIS CEBULAwww.monkeypuzzleonline.com

TRAVIS CEBULA lives in Golden, Colorado with his wife, Shannon. His poems, photographs, and stories have appeared in The Talk-ing River Review, Bombay Gin, Apothecary, In Stereo Magazine, The Strip, Whrrds, Eleven Eleven, The Bath-room, and Monkey Puzzle. In 2008 he was a finalist for the Third Coast Poetry Prize.

SOME EXITSTRAVIS CEBULA

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ISBN 978-0-9801650-3-650695

Travis Cebula’s poetry is a visual and auditory convocation of images, a celebration of sight and sound both beauti-ful and tragic at once. From “interstate to pasture,” an adventure awaits you in Some Exits.

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SOME EXITS

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SOME EXITS

TRAVIS CEBULA

MONKEY PUZZLE PRESSBOULDER, COLORADO

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Monkey Puzzle Press3116 47th St.

Boulder, CO 80301www.monkeypuzzleonline.com

ISBN 978-0-9801650-3-2

Cover Photo by Travis Cebula

Cover & Book Design by Nate Jordon and Travis Cebula

Copyright © 2009 by Travis CebulaAll rights reserved

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For Shannon

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“...look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else.”

Tom Stoppard

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I founded Monkey Puzzle Press in 2007 during my graduate studies at the Jack Kerouac School of Naropa University. During my time there, I recognized I was sur-rounded by a sea of talent – much of it undiscovered in the world at large. In order to create a platform to exhibit such talent, and create a community to support it, I de-cided to develop a publishing company and a literary arts journal – Monkey Puzzle. I’ve been fortunate to receive and publish work that continually pushes the boundary of contemporary American literature, of which Travis Cebula is an essential part of, and the first to trust me with exhibiting his work. Travis’ poetry is a visual and auditory convoca-tion of images, a celebration of sight and sound both beautiful and tragic at once. With “fanciful flames,” his “message [is] fast” and visceral. With pen in one hand, the other on the steering wheel, and “eyes squinted…fac-ing the road ahead,” Travis takes the reader on a journey through our environment both natural and industrialized. From “interstate to pasture,” an adventure awaits you in Some Exits.

Nate Jordon April 11, 2009 Boulder, Colorado

Publisher’s Note

vii

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Some Exits

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marble cold wind winter in Boulder

white fog, snow

smoke drifts off stone chimneys

sharp with a smell like weeds

caught and smoldering

on catalytic converters

White

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following Eisenhower’s asphalt legacy doing 80 through Colorado Springsthe interstate lasheda river of brown morning mixed slush and graveldrunken expressionisthurled sticky paint mag-chloride classic down the windows of my car fanciful flames, their message “fast”or Woody Woodpeckera brown badgemocking dirt decalaerodynamic as the 1950’swith cigar clenched and eyes squintedgrimly facing the road ahead

Driving South in Winter

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Some Exits 1

some exitsare marked solely with numbers

a fading dirt roadgrovels westto the Sangre de Cristosand a row of mailboxesleans on the vergetheir posts wedded with baling wirehuddled refugees in tin babushkastorsos failingbut strong enough togetherto stand in the settling dust

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Elizabeth Robinson, Sara Nolan, Jenny Henry, and Nate Jordon for all their help in the evolution of Some Exits. The creation of a book - even one this modest - needs an accumulation of hard work, love, and community to come to fruition. You have all pro-vided the nurturing it needed, and I am grateful.

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www.monkeypuzzleonline.com

“Travis Cebula takes the reader on a poetic road trip, a journey whose rhythms shift dynamically between movement and focus. The short, tightly made poems of this se-quence speed the reader through an envi-ronment that is at once natural and unnatu-ral, gorgeous and degraded. Cebula gives us a new Eden, one that is riddled with such presences as Wal-Mart and Woody Wood-pecker. Traveling the necessary byways of poetic thought, Some Exits functions as a Baedeker that leads us through the fragile terrain of contemporary life. ”

- Elizabeth Robinson Author of The Orphan & Its Relations

“Travis Cebula’s poems are often as exqui-sitely spare as the landscapes they contain. More than exits, these pieces are entrances. The poems follow a trajectory from a dirt-ied Eden to anywhere that is also a poignant and particular somewhere. His verse is a form of mimicry of the variegated contour where terrain and capitalism collide; these are small elegies to the land that precedes us and will remain, however wasted, after our exit.”

- Sara Nolan The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics

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ISBN 978-0-9801650-3-650695

TRAVIS CEBULA lives in Golden, Colorado with his wife, Shannon. His poems, photographs, and stories have appeared in The Talk-ing River Review, Bombay Gin, Apothecary, In Stereo Magazine, The Strip, Whrrds, Eleven Eleven, The Bathroom, and Monkey Puzzle. In 2008 he was a finalist for the Third Coast Poetry Prize.