Nicholas Christopher

Nicholas Christopher Poems

Nicholas Christopher Biography

Nicholas Christopher (born 1951) is an American novelist, poet and critic, the author of sixteen books: six novels, eight volumes of poetry, a critical study of film noir, and a novel for children. Christopher graduated from Harvard College with an A.B. in English Literature. After traveling extensively abroad, he returned to New York and began publishing his work. He taught at New York University and Yale before receiving an appointment as a professor on the permanent faculty of the Writing Program of the School of the Arts at Columbia University. From the 1970s, his work has appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, The New Republic, The Paris Review, The Nation, and The New York Review of Books. Among his honors are fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Academy of American Poets, and the Poetry Society of America. Christopher is the author of six novels, eight books of poetry, a study of film noir and the American city, a novel for children, and has edited two poetry anthologies. Christopher's sixth novel, Tiger Rag, was published by the Dial Press in January 2013. His novel for children, The True Adventures of Nicolo Zen, was published by Alfred A. Knopf in January 2014. His novels have been translated into fourteen foreign languages. In the United States, his first novel was published by Viking Penguin and all his subsequent novels by the Dial Press. His poetry publishers have been Alfred A. Knopf, Viking Penguin, and Harcourt. His major characters have included a young concert pianist, a magician's daughter, a nurse on a hospital ship off Vietnam, an orphan raised in a hotel filled with miraculous characters in Las Vegas, an inventor during the Great Depression and a compiler of bestiaries. His eight collections include many verse forms from haiku to a novella in verse.)

The Best Poem Of Nicholas Christopher

Film Noir

The girl on the rooftop stares out
over the city and grips a cold revolver.
Laundry flaps around her in the hot night.
Each streetlight haloes a sinister act.
People are trapped in their beds, dreaming of
the A-bomb and hatching get-rich-quick schemes.
Pickpockets and grifters prowl the streets.
Hit-men stalk informers and crooked cops hide in churches.
Are there no more picket fences and tea parties
in America? Does no one have a birthday anymore?
Even the ballgames are fixed, and the quiz shows.
Airplanes full of widows circle the skyline.
Young couples elope in stolen cars.
All the prostitutes were wronged terribly in childhood.
They wear polka dot skirts, black gloves, and trenchcoats.
Men strut around in boxy suits, fedoras, and palm-tree ties.
They jam into nightclubs or brawl in hotel rooms
while saxophone music drowns out their cries.
The girl in the shadows drops the revolver
and pushes through the laundry to the edge of the roof.
Her eyes are glassy, her hair blows wild.
She looks down at her lover sprawled on the sidewalk
and she screams.
A crowd gathers in a pool of neon.
It starts to rain.

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