Full Description
How do we make sense of our suffering? World of Dew grapples with this question by embracing impermanence, the death of a loved one, the transmutation of an old belief, the adoption of a new culture. Lindsay Stuart Hill navigates the space "where 'lost' still differs from 'gone'" and the dream of reversal or undoing remains: "Turn your back to a mirror, hold up a mirror: / an endless passage opens behind you."
Moving from the tide pools of Maine to the streets of Hyderabad, Hill entwines grief and awe, beauty and violence, truth and delusion. These poems form a scrapbook of missing girls, clothes drying on a clothesline, lingering romances. This is the world of dew—a gorgeous and fragile cosmos where we know nothing lasts, and yet we remain—questioning, dreaming, hoping.
This precise, image-driven debut reminds us that only when we let go of who we once were can we become the person we are meant to be.
Contents
One
Paris Penitence
The Finches
Collecting Shells
The BahÁ'Í School
Reversal Kit
It's January Still
After You Said No
Morning in Station North
Page from a Woodland Journal, with Sketches of Yellow Wildflowers
At a Farm in Silverton
Autumn Scrapbook
Two
Poem Ending with a Bollywood Song
Pastoral
Monsoon Season, 2008
Five Photographs: My Host Brother, Me
Bracelet
Ajar
Night Ride Through Hi-Tec City
"When you get here, turn the light around to shine back."
Three
The Pain Body
Nanquan Kills a Cat
The Gardener's Sutra
Overlapping Elegies
To
The Line I Cut
The Mountain and the Teaspoon
The Widow and the Pinecone
Funeral for a Water Child
"You have only one life, and that life is not yours alone."
Love Poem with Lemon and Radishes
Acknowledgments
Notes
