how do i net thee
Who, or what, can be captured in such open forms is this book’s question, and it asks it in the aftermath of personal and familial loss.
Appendices Pulled from a Study on Light
The poems and prose in Appendices Pulled from a Study on Light thus delve into Babbitt’s passion for illuminated manuscripts, his confessed object of reverence.
Bare Neck of the Woods
My ma // said agony // said hurt // said she’d be // damned // if pain // ain’t the one // thing all folk // say’s true // says all folk bow // when pain // huck // her elbow // across they neck
Lush
I’m looking // at a scrap of fog a quarter mile off / and wondering / if I touch a cedar here, / will a cedar there feel my affection / at the rate / of three inches per second, / or if I bite it, if I tell it / I’m lonely for what it has / though swaddled / by learning yet again / where intelligence hides, how thoughts flow / through air and ground / in a way I can’t invent, only destroy. I don’t know
how I’ll ever prune a tree again
My Mother as an Instrument of the Divine
Before stamping out her own breath, my mother / rehearses the act in tiny permutations. Flowers // assailed by some rare malevolent illness / are mercifully plucked from their beds. // Family photos are similarly liberated, one day / collaged in cracking and scrupulously assembled // volumes, the next scattered over floorboards / without respect to date or theme. I am 25.
Bad Queer (Homunculus)
In a moonless mattress of night / I made a boy of you. // In a heaven without hair / the trees strip off their leaves // like an ill-fitting dress. // With a mouthful of petals the boys / acted their buck racks & ten points. // History is a family of wifeless nail-biters. // Welcome to heaven where we already know / you’re lying.
Yield Architecture
Throughout this collection, Syersak reconfigures and responds to art, philosophy, poetry, and history by directly addressing them. The “dear” of “dear architecture” that opens this collection represents the structure of address—what Syersak calls the “apostrophic pose”—that this book endeavors to build through matter and language.
Silk Road
In these poems, delicately and profusely braided together in a loose narrative of nine sections, Daneen Wardrop envisions medieval life in Venice and the Silk Road through the eyes of Marco Polo’s wife, Donata Badoer.
Anatomic
After having an impressive series of tests run on his body, Dickinson uses poetry as his laboratory notebook. The poems in Anatomic record data, suggest hypotheses, provide context for discoveries, and lay out the subject’s reflections.
The Owl Was a Baker’s Daughter
Winner of the 2018 Colorado Prize for Poetry, selected by John Yau Selected by John Yau for the 2018 Colorado Prize for Poetry, The Owl Was a Baker’s Daughter, Gillian Cummings’s second book, gives voice to her version of Ophelia, a young woman shattered by unbearable losses, and questions what makes a mind unwind till […]