Saturn Returns

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.

Saturn Returns

Poetry, First Edition (January 2023)

84 pages

• Softcover with color cover
• 54 poems
• Features B&W archival photographs of Saturn and its moons by NASA

It 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 black

and 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 boxes

and 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 said

shit, 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 SPEAKING

This 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!

the people who want to jettison themselves into space: why, just to ache? for trees and for their fires while everyone else laughs

until it hurts. Sorry, fellas, but I'm not missing out on the fun so

this is a book of poems to be left on the world whose toes burn

into a beautiful ground, whose heads lift to linger longer on this ship whipping through the long-lost sky

than those sailing on the

fastest fuel culled by man; so, like,

Have a good flight.