paper • 68 pages • 13.95
ISBN-10: 1-884800-41-6

Arrow Pointing North

David Dodd Lee

THE WEDGE

In a wide, white room, I’ve been refusing to cooperate
It’s true

But yesterday, Monday, I spent the morning logging in deer-kill data
At the fish hatchery

A single orange leaf floats over the ice-blue pond . . .

A little fur the color of rust
Coming away bright on my fingers—the animals’ lips pried
Making them look as if they may begin screaming

"David Dodd Lee's poems just don't work like anyone else's, they're far too possessed by their genius, beautiful, scary, saintly, grotesque—like the nature these poems confront us with again and again. This poet, brilliant and thoroughly unpretentious, is as a Huck Finn grown up, schooled, suffering stupefying jobs without equally stupefying complaint, going to what's left of the woods only to find savagery. And savagery turns out to be not what we ever thought it was, but instead, unending struggle, the strife that is the only source of justice: seasons of now exultant, now unforgivable moments: confrontations with nature that are encounters with a self always at some vanishing point, with no end move, only nerves and a largeness of mind assenting to its own saving graces. This is a fearless book of fears: there's nothing like it out there, though its strange world is immediately and utterly recognizable." —William Olsen