The Near Surround

“In taut, tentative lyrics that attempt a precarious balance in a landscape ravaged by loss, the narrator allows the wounded psyche to begin its laborious process of emergence and renewal. These tentative explorations focus on negative space made palpable when viewed through the gauzy layers of creation’s healing art: ‘Now I watch / what gathers between us, // between me / and what isn’t you.’ Like H.D., our neglected master of the fragmentary gesture, Nancy Mitchell offers wrenching testimonials to those vast and luminous human privacies that animate and transform our common selves.” — Michael Waters