Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $9.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Way to Go
    Way to Go
    Way to Go
    Ebook71 pages32 minutes

    Way to Go

    By Richard Sanger

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    ONE OF CBC BOOKS’ BEST BOOKS OF 2023

    A jubilant, irreverent, generous collection by a poet facing terminal illness.

    Following his New York Times Best of the Year Dark Woods, Richard Sanger's fourth and final book is a clear-eyed and big-hearted inventory of the passions of a life well lived. Understated, tender, archly funny and achingly generous, Way to Go is a joyful catalog of Sanger's loves and a last gift from an irrepressibly jubilant poet.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBiblioasis
    Release dateApr 4, 2023
    ISBN9781771965545
    Way to Go
    Author

    Richard Sanger

    Richard Sanger (1960–2022) grew up in Ottawa and lived in Toronto. He published three poetry collections and a chapbook, Fathers at Hockey (2020); Dark Woods, was named one of the top ten poetry books of 2018 by the New York Times. His plays included Not Spain, Two Words for Snow, Hannah’s Turn, and Dive as well as translations of Calderon, Lorca, and Lope de Vega. He also published essays, reviews, and poetry translations.

    Related to Way to Go

    Related ebooks

    Poetry For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Any Given Day

      Mar 29, 2021

      Any Given Day
      11 min read

    • Article

      The Social Picnic

      May 15, 2022

      The Social Picnic
      2 min read

    • Article

      The Plague Legends

      Dec 1, 2021

      The Plague Legends
      12 min read

    • Article

      It’s Come to This

      Sep 1, 2021

      It’s Come to This
      16 min read

    • Article

      Shelf Life

      Nov 2, 2023

      I’m not sure if I can truly pinpoint the moment my new novel Once A Monster was born – but I can trace the history of some of its most important ingredients. As a boy, looking through an old illustrated book of Greek myths, and being at once captiva

      5 min read

    • Article

      The Trouble Gene

      Jul 1, 2020

      One clear thing about trouble—it can set you back to zero, a personal cone of silence. And reading, writing, listening allow entry into that troubled solitude; you disappear into it regardless t of the time or place you really are in, be it bed, kitc

      12 min read

    • Article

      Five Poems

      Jul 1, 2023

      People let themselves down so hard they took to clappingwhen the plane lands. Sometimes even at the creditsof a movie. Their funerals turned out to be for the livingall along. You wouldn’t know how much they hatedcrowded trains by the way they kept b

      3 min read

    • Article

      Beautiful In The Distance

      Jun 24, 2019

      Beautiful In The Distance
      10 min read

    • Article

      Six Poems

      Jul 1, 2018

      When I said, to my mother, What was a goodthing about me as a child?, my mother’sface seemed to unfurl from the center,hibiscus in fast motion, the anthersand flounces springing out with joy. Oh you wereenchanting, she breathed. What do you mean—craz

      5 min read

    • Article

      Four Poems

      Jan 1, 2021

      I learned the world through the bottoms of my feet, barein the creeks of summer, stepping on pebbles, the squidgeof moss between my toes. On hot asphalt, the hop and skipover cracks, feet already toughened by bramble, dirt, the pricklyground of pine

      4 min read

    • Article

      “Singing In The Outhouse”

      Mar 1, 2024

      I dreamed I heard somebodySinging in the outhouse—Frank Stanford, “The Singing Knives” Growing up in the Virginia woods we deprecatingly referred to as “the sticks,” one of my friends had a genuine outhouse in their backyard. Their old farmhouse had

      15 min read

    • Article

      Four Poems

      Nov 1, 2019

      Four Poems
      7 min read

    • Article

      Five Poems

      Jan 1, 2022

      The painting is of a door, its wood so warpedwith moisture it cannot close. It stays ajar leaving a sliver of light—enough to suggestsomething sweet and almost unreachable behind the door—and you sit in yourroom working on the bills or those comforti

      4 min read

    • Article

      At The Bend Of The Road

      Jul 20, 2021

      At The Bend Of The Road
      18 min read

    • Article

      Three Poems

      Nov 1, 2020

      1 The doctor makes a curving incision in the left topback of my skull andlifts the cap— “What areaam I here to work on?” But Ijust want to wish his son a Happy Birthday—It had been my aim, the reason I’dwalked right into this Doctor dream—In the morn

      11 min read

    • Article

      Stranger Places

      Aug 9, 2018

      It began like any normal pregame in the woods. Naked, alone, hungover, a sweaty sleeping bag in the back of a dusty pickup truck, miles from civilization. Predawn in a narrow Utah river bottom, canyon country, early July. A Thermos of lukewarm coffee

      18 min read

    • Article

      Skunk City

      Nov 25, 2022

      Skunk City
      3 min read

    • Article

      Four Poems

      Jul 1, 2018

      the Bradford Pears, green-and-white globes of my girlhoodwhose smell I’ve tried to name for years, settling on piss, but walking by a row of them on my way to the grade school,I thought baking soda. Junk trees, those spring debutantes stinking in the

      2 min read

    • Article

      As the World Collapses

      Jul 27, 2017

      As the World Collapses
      7 min read

    • Article

      Body Language

      Aug 14, 2019

      Body Language
      5 min read

    • Article

      Stop Hating on Adjectives!

      Jun 12, 2019

      A common admonition in creative writing pedagogy is, “Cut as many adjectives as possible.” I propose that this rule springs from mere prejudice. The post Stop Hating on Adjectives! appeared first on The Millions.

      7 min read

    • Article

      Seven Poems

      May 1, 2023

      There was a boy even stranger than I waswho’d call me in the eveningto see if I’d come to Scouts. Something in mehesitated. Then one morning during eighth grade English we got hall passesand did it in a stall in the bathroomtaking turns over the john

      3 min read

    • Article

      Ghost Girl, Banana

      Aug 21, 2023

      By the time I was 25, there were only two things I remembered about Mumma. The first was that she smelled of watermelons, the second was that we were happy. We’d taken our father’s name of course, but a name is only half a story. The other half exist

      6 min read

    • Article

      Yemaja’s Siren

      Jul 18, 2023

      Yemaja’s Siren
      11 min read

    • Article

      “Properties of Thirst”

      Jul 5, 2022

      “Properties of Thirst”
      11 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Way to Go

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Way to Go - Richard Sanger

      i.

      Into the Park

      Into the park in late summer on your bike,

      the sudden chill of trees and shade, the breeze

      down the front of your shirt

      cool against your chest, linen rippling

      a frisson tingling your nipples,

      as the afternoon heat

      lingering

      on the grass starts to retreat,

      the bike whirrs and into the park you go,

      deeper, this is your park, you know

      its groves, its benches, its three-storey trees,

      depressions where rain gathers, puddles freeze,

      and it changes every time—

      that’s why you come, the anticipation,

      you don’t know what you’ll find here,

      as the shadows grow in the bushes, or who

      you’ll meet at the bench

      someone you know,

      or someone new,

      or someone you knew

      a long time ago

      now with eyes that have seen so much more

      and lines in his face, or hers,

      and deeper you go and further back

      no idea what you’ll say when you meet, or do,

      what new arrangements or conspiracies you’ll fall into,

      what raw truths,

      what entanglements, what dangers.

      The Sands

      Frown and wrinkled lip he’s got. Sunk in himself

      on the sidewalk, head the same height

      as the briefcases and exhaust pipes,

      he sneers at the coins that drop. Taxis idle,

      then pull out, buff his face with fumes.

      When he coughs, it’s a truck that won’t start

      some subzero morning in the trailer park.

      Once it was his foot on the pedal, the tunes

      blasting as he tore up the highway

      to Fort Mac, Fort Chip. But he can’t go back,

      not to that landscape. The tar, the trees, the sands,

      the traplines that were his kingdom . . . All gone.

      And the machines he drove—colossal wrecks—

      rust like dinosaurs beside the tailing ponds.

      Was It

      Driving early one spring morning

      out of the city, the two boys

      in the back seat playing peek-a-boo,

      the city, all glass, girders, concrete,

      strip malls, Costcos, service stations

      sprouted up here and there

      so we can keep driving, taking the city

      further and further out, and still find

      not a speck of green in sight,

      not a tree or leaf—is this what we do,

      pave, encase, squish the living sap

      out of the earth?—and now a laugh,

      a titter starts and won’t cease, was it for this,

      a giggle, a chortle deep-throated

      like a crack opening in the asphalt

      or a brook in early spring

      galloping down a wooded slope,

      over stones, sticks and clumps of ice,

      was it for this we made the roads,

      rampaged ahead without a thought,

      over every obstacle we found:

      dead black leaves, tree bark, rocky outcrops,

      for this, we dynamited granite,

      cut through hillsides, flattened the planet,

      pausing only to regroup,

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1