Full Description
In Two Signatures, Sara Ellen Fowler initiates her readers into a synesthetic contract of close attention and deep feeling. From the wood floor of an art museum buckling with Lake Michigan moisture, to the mud-packed hooves of the horse of childhood, to an art student's spit on a pane of mirrored glass, the poems' images string together a necklace of exquisite longing. Pleasures and complexities of sensory experience lay the ground for a world where risk is rewarded and candor is sensual. The poet explores registers of desire and power, drawing upon her training as a visual artist to make a studio of language. Temperature and texture gain grammar as the poems reach toward awe via multivalent psychology, sex, and sculptural interventions. These poems invite readers to explore the vulnerability and insistence that mark one's devotion to any creative practice.
Contents
Good Mare
I. WARNING STARS
Glassell Park
The Cutters
I do not comprehend the current traveling
Window
Lithium
Portrait with water
Velvet
Old Paint
II. STILL LIFE
Painted monument in the night of my body
Reading with Temperature
One cannot pray to the horses
You come for me
Engram
Untitled (daemon)
Black licorice
Valentine,
Night Shirt
Aloud
Garnet
What I mean by temperature
III. A LOOSE EXTENSION OF AN EARLIER MEANING
[I learn to lick]
[I learn tension]
[Because I am skulled with the thought]
[I learn to prepare the ground]
[stay the gun and tawn-amber]
[Just give me a job]
[A postcard]
IV. OLD BOND
My mother was a barrel racer
On the poet's thirtieth birthday, 1962
Reading Plath
Light's loose skin
Right After, 1969
Elegy for Skip Lanz
Rest
Nightjar
V. RECEIVER
Chicken
Mare and all
Whole
Snowblink
Bracelet for Who I Was
Bezel for my mind
Texture
Ars Poetica
Blue-brown morning, I step through common starlings
Receiver
Parachute
Notes
Acknowledgments
