Full Description
A poetry collection that brings together word, image, and sound to reflect on fractured, fragmentary states of being.
The poetry of Mandible Wishbone Solvent is situated in the space of bridges, fragmentary overlays, spectral reach, and the desire to keep reaching. Asiya Wadud's poems engage in this act, not to stake a claim or to fasten themselves, but to hold fragments together in order to offer possibilities for connection and extension. Throughout the collection lies an acknowledgment that any hold will drift, meander, and find new paths, with each separation making space for new entanglements. Drawing on a keen interest in tactility and ekphrasis, Wadud mines the repetition and extension that comes with any fractured state of existence and considers the nature of a residual and roving we.
Following this selection of lyrical, ekphrastic, fragmented poems, the book concludes with two prose pieces that dwell on the concepts of "isthmus" and "drift," respectively, which offer further grounds for contemplation and provide a frame for the poems.
Contents
Part 1: Other ovals all along
#221 ½
poised in hover hours
seven desire lines one map
disclose concentric centers
the herring arrive as overture
all excess bloomed then felled
and green waters and green
be a bridge over something
1.2
Part 2: Scant excess enclosed in a film
Mandible Wishbone Solvent
Shorn, treaded, red
a symmetrical open plane, curve
In the checkpoint I was all arms / all face
the disc takes shape, dear cutlass
Part 3: Microplane weights / accounts of first contact
cobalt mirror image 1
cobalt mirror image 2
cobalt mirror image 3
cobalt mirror image 4
cobalt mirror image 5
cobalt mirror image 6
my mind makes for me a window then a door
Part 4: The shroud can encase whatever we tell it
Nearly Any Two Things Can Cohere
Acknowledgments
Drift: Against proximal distance from the center
