Full Description
While ranging from creekbanks to hummocks, from barrier islands to ridges and hollers (from the Kansas River to West Penobscot Bay, to the Edisto, to various tributaries of the New and the James, the Neuse and the Savannah), the poems in According to Sand exhume often lost and surprising senses of the world and of words. They track, these creaturely poems, the abundant and the minimal, singing (in praise and loss) the uncanniness of existence. Into the waters and the lives there, this collection goes: the ghost crabs, fungi, heron crap, shifts of light, of history, family, time, a doll's head on a riverbank, deadfall, leaves, weeds; yes, lots of plants, some in blossom, many edible. There are lyric sequences. There are the strange ekphrastics of ""Thaw"" and ""Figure Drawn on the Ground as the Bull Moose Urinates Upon Waking."" There are riddles (can you hear, maybe even name, what from the other-than-human-world is speaking?). Also historical and botanical persona narratives, rimas dissolutas, and other echoes among them. ACCORDING TO SAND is an aching, wryly joyous collection that embodies the erosive and porous qualities of sand and invites us to recognize how we might remain among the remains, settling, shifting, filtering, and surviving.
