Full Description
This collection is named for a "swale," a shallow channel used to direct the flow of rainwater. Similarly, Swale looks outward to the natural world and directs its focus inward to the landscape of the mind. The past presses in like a thick mist: plundering colonial ships and the cracking edges of empire coincide with contemporary scenes and personal erosions and failures. Alongside humans are animals both living and extinct: manatees, sea turtles, and whales; roaming bears, horses, and lambs; and the flightless dodo and Steller's sea cow, gone for centuries. What happens when the mind eclipses what the body sees, and neither can be trusted—when demarcations between land and water blur, and one's sense of self begins to recede?
Swale interrogates the violence of colonialism and its reverberations over time, as well as the extinction and the rapid decline of animal species. By turns tidal and cloistered, Swale speaks of science, reliquaries, and lapis lazuli, traversing forests, seascapes, and meadows. Here, the ocean becomes a field, a medieval tapestry transforms into a space that can be entered, and the body is fleshless, struck through with light. The speaker of these poems is ultimately unfixed—and with that comes both imaginative possibility and a personal unmooring. In poems that cast and recast the interior self in different guises—from the perpetually off-kilter Alice to the divergent voices of the shorn lamb and predatory foxhound—an unsettling anxiety grows starker, along with the wish for repair.
Contents
I
Calenture
Sometimes My Body Lifts as a Wave
So I Try to Picture the Priests
On the New Continent, Our Eyes Shining
"I Have Written Myself into a Tropical Glow"
Scurvy
Steller and the Sea Cow
The Mermaids at Weeki Wachee
II
The Trouble Is I
As Lamb in Field
Alice in the Cloisters
Reliquary
As Knock-Kneed
Alice in Millefleurs
Flock or Herd, They Came to Me
The Lapis Lazuli in Which She Dreamed
As Twin Horses
Alice Goes for a Run, Considers the Year, How She Barely Shook
On this One Acre of the World
Forest Rising from Its Name
When Living in Bear Country
Alice above Timberline
As Foxhound
When Living in Bear Country
III
Swale
Ghost Forest
From an Age of Sail
Polaris
On Effort
You Like to Think the Whales Are Listening
Ghost Lobster
Dream from the Shade
A Color of Sunset
Sometimes I Am Permitted to Return to the Sea
Whale Fall
Alice among the Graves
IV
So Legged and Footed
[Oh, Dodo. You can't]
[Dodo, duodo, sluggard.]
[Swampland. Bog. Mare aux Songes. "Sea of dreams"]
[Out the birds, out]
[Seeds, or the collapsed bodies]
[I dreamt my stomach was full of stones]
[The lead scattered through your cranial bone]
[They called you melancholy, too.]
[You, again,]
[So legged, so footed, and who's left to care?]
Notes
