Like Oysters Observing the Sun

Poetry. Drawing inspiration from un/natural talismans--on sources as disparate as Moby Dick, early neuroanatomy texts, and pop-up books--the poems and lyric prose in this collection wrestle with summoning cultural spectres past and future, labor to fathom a present that materializes in forms both wondrous and monstrous.

Like Ishmael, who likens humans' attempts to apprehend the metaphysical to 'oysters observing the sun through the water... thinking that thick water the thinnest of air, ' the voices in Brenda Sieczkowski's exquisite first book know that to truly apprehend in this world is always, simultaneously, to understand and to doubt--to realize absolutely how little we can know. Whether exploring folk medicine or neuroscience, Melville or Lewis Carroll, our cultural monsters of the moment or our long-standing haints, Sieczkowski's poems are funny and dangerous, prophetic and whip- smart--asking us what we owe each other, what we believe in, what we can know of the selves and worlds that tumbleweed onto our psyches or trail after us like flotsam. The language here is dense, tangy, full of the mortal body and its thing-ness, all the jangly beauty and grotesquerie and loss of the material world. And though playful it isn't playing around; it knows precisely what's at stake. This is the most capacious, necessary work I have read in quite a while. Brenda Sieczkowski is the real deal. Read this book, right here, and open your eyes.--Donna de la Perrière

It is sometimes the peril and privilege of poetry to remind us that our very worst fears are indeed well justified. We have exhausted the patience of our earth, of our flesh, and of the elements themselves. A reckoning is underway. Animals rebel. Our senses rebel. The syllables of outcry are in open rebellion against our words. All this Sieczkowski documents with prophetic rigor and then, in poems of the damnedest, dearest insouciance I have ever encountered, begins to play.--Donald Revell