Inside this debut collection, girlhood's dangers echo, transmuted, in the poet's fears for her son. A body just discovering the vastness of "want's new acreage" is humbled by chronic illness. Epithalamion turns elegy. But this world that so often seems capricious in its cruelty also shelters apple orchards, glass museums, schoolchildren, century-old sharks; "there's no accounting for / all we want to save, no names."
Oliver's polyphonic gathering of speakers includes lovers and saints, painters and dead poets, a hawk and a mother. In varied forms (ghazals and prose poems, dialogues and erasures, bref double and Golden Shovel, among others) these poems bear witness to and seek reprieve from disasters at once commonplace and terrifying. "I can't surface for every scalpel slice, / I need a dreamy estuary present," she writes.
Stumbling toward joy across time and space, these poems hum with fear and desire, bewildering loss, and love's lush possibilities.
