"Walking past a mirrored building, I think of you. The world without you in it. I wouldn't recognize my own face."How do you hold fast to another person, knowing all along you must ultimately let go? Spanning over a decade, the poems in Nighttime examine questions of mortality and the body, identity, nature, and place. Part journal, part survival notes, Nighttime is the story of a daughter and her father; a portrait in reverse. It's a lament, a reckoning, a prayer, an offering.
Root Rot as a collection is a reckoning with the environment and histories, internal and external. It explores grief and loss, and that disruption spurs growth. This book closes with land acknowledgment, though these poems work as acknowledgment of the land itself, those interior and exterior spaces. Louisiana, Florida, and Oregon are cataloged as we learn of flood waters rising into houses, and storms blowing past, too. Much has rot, corrosion, mildew, and "what the sun gives / does not match what our bodies need." What is not lacking is music. "Winter pulls no punches yet I forget / every year how it bleeds." The voices offer interiority of a type that seeks to include us.
"Have you ever woken up in the middle of the night and felt your skin prickling at the base of your skull-felt like somewhere, inside the blackness above you, an unknown presence was hovering-a power? A fear?" This is a chapbook collection of poems inspired by the visual minimal poems of Aram Saroyan, with a bonus essay about how we perceive the physical and spiritual world around us.
As the title of this gorgeous collection suggests, Would-Land is an adventure in wordplay and the discoveries of our heart- and hearth-truths that language (in its inevitable slippage) can reveal. And the slips of both language and self are what''s at stake here. Oscillating between elegiac and epigrammatic, Essbaum''s poems share at once the ecstasies of sound and syncopation of a modern-day Gerard Manley Hopkins, and the acerbic insights of a more sensuous Dorothy Parker, with a little of Emily Dickinson''s taut ferocity for the sublime thrown in. Love, loss, coupling, uncoupling, coupleting, incompleting, faith, forgiveness-all of this and more is explored in these poems which are both gut-wrenching in their candor and lavish in their language. I am an unrepentant fan.
-Rebecca Lindenberg, Love, An Index
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