Böcker i Wick Poetry Chapbook Series Five-serien

These poems are stories, are seeds, are secret messages cast and sent across the natural world to a reader, where they blossom in the imagination. The plot is `scatter-wild', the lyrics `all willful and fallow'. Carter's language serves as a garden, rich and strange, full of acorns and ink and ash, and in it the green world is overturned, recycled, and remade.

Spanning oceans and continents, language and the imagination, the unfathomable distances between people and their desires, Allison Davis' Poppy Seeds creates an `immaculate atlas'. Here language is `broken. . . against the margin of the sea', and a word is a thing that can be `wash[ed] away'.

In Punctum, Lesley Jenike's new collection, she writes, "It's our language: what can we call a thing / that is and is not." These poems are haunted by a "non-child", a child who was not to be born, and with it, a life the speaker was not to live. Absence itself becomes a nearly tangible presence."

Having children fundamentally disrupts and remakes us, in terms of body, identity, perspective, and voice. The world shrinks and exponentially expands. Our already-fraught human experience of time is shredded and magnified. Cadence captures the poet's point of view as a new mother, revelling in a position of heightened vulnerability and ferocity.

A book about a way-making and way-finding. It is a journey, both internal and external, across a map, over borders, through a life, and in a body. It is passage and pilgrimage, odyssey and exile. Above all it is a book of questions.