paper • 94 pages • 15.95
ISBN-13: 978-1-884800-80-1
from DEGREES OF LATITUDE
We all lived together in the big stone house, my mother, my father, my two brothers and me.
Like bats, avoiding each other by radar.
˚
Even now:
When we (that is, Lionel and I) invite Buddy and his wife to go dancing, he says there’s a thirty percent chance.
No, he says, you have to understand. That’s up from zero.
˚
Thirty-five million years ago. Ice began to form.
˚
In my crib I could hear them by the fireless fireside.
In silhouette, silent, my Arctic family circle: mother, father, Buddy, Will.
My father might have called it a den of inequity.
In the dark above my crib: spirals swirling.
In my held breath: Aurora borealis.
“…Through lyric meditation, overheard conversation, personal anecdote, newspaper entries, and journals, [Blossom] charts an interior life not seen before but at once recognizable. I love how this book renews one’s faith in the possibilities of poetry, and in its power to delight with true innovation and luminous renewal.” – Jason Shinder
“This work crosses, formally and insightfully, the traditional borders of confession and memoir, and moves into the unknown, mapping what is visible as well as what has, until now, been hidden. I have been waiting a long time to read this book, and it is very much worth the wait.” – Carolyn Forché
“…We have the wounds of the earth and the wounds of its inhabitants made transparent by blunt truths. This is an intimate book, without explanations or conclusions for our suffering. Rather, the poems perceive our inheritances—of the body and of the planet—critically and graphically.” – Jane Miller