Kirjahaku

The evening beyond each chain-lit match seemed to crouch in the shapes of houses, then rose to play havoc in a veil of dogwoods. In among the lapses, deer stooped on their stilts to eat the tulips which, under these circumstances, turned away from the source like moths losing themselves in folded wool. Are we alone? If so, Particle and Wave insists that we need not be lonely. Here the periodic table of elements-a system familiar to many of us from high school chemistry-unfolds in a series of unexpected meanings with connotations public, personal, and existential. Based on a logic that considers the atomic symbol an improvised phoneme, Particle and Wave is keenly attuned to the qualities of voice and concerned with how these improvisations fall on the listening ear. From the most recent housing bust, to the artistic visions of Christo and Jeanne Claude, to the labors of the Curies, to Pliny the Younger's account of the eruption of Vesuvius, culture and world histories are recontextualized through the lens of personal experience. Muscular, precise, structurally varied, and imagistic, these poems engage in lyricism yet resist mere confession. In doing so they project the self as a composite, speaking in a variety of registers, from the nursery rhyme songster, to the ascetic devotee, to the unapologetic sensualist. They welcome all comers and elbow the bounded physical world to make way for a dynamic, new subjectivity.

Reflecting on the Salem witch trials, Puritan minister Cotton Mather cautioned his flock against the moral temptations of the unknown wild, located in what he termed an ""American desert."" Today, more than three hundred years later, we understand that our troubles have their origins not in some ambiguous beyond; rather, they are of our own making. Benjamin Landry's Mercies in the American Desert attempts a clear-eyed reckoning with the people and the nation we have become: a land assailed by gun violence, police brutality, and state-sanctioned racism. This vivid collection considers a range of bodies encompassing the geographic, the personal, and the political. It locates solace in movement, sound, and observation, as when Pina Bausch heron-dances down a traffic median or when the expansive form of a surfacing manta ray teaches us how to breathe again. Incorporating short bursts of prose poem alongside longer meditations, and working in both alliterative and narrative modes, Mercies in the American Desert conjures a redemptive wilderness for our time.