There is a thread of confinement in many of these pieces, but also startling, great expanses. The poems are compressed into kitchens and subway cars until they burst into telescoping hallways or shooting stars. This year the art pieces, too, have a sense of grand and bitter space. Often their perspective is warped, or from great height. We understand being shut in very well; these pieces remind us to look down and far away. With compression comes pushback, and in some poems it comes by imagining sizzling summers, cool classical autumns, or fields of bloated January sunflowers. Other poems see with an atlas gaze over lakes and oceans into the past. This collection moves: it starts out loud and funny –– or desperate –– then pauses to contemplate, clutches and gnaws at language, and ends by telling us bold stories, where ageless and immortal things are crushed and passed around. Like a string of thoughts when lying still, this collection moves.
- Claire Ellis and Marco Istasy
