Inside the Storm I Want to Touch the Tremble

Inside this debut collection, girlhoods dangers echo, transmuted, in the poets fears for her son. A body just discovering the vastness of wants new acreage is humbled by chronic illness. Epithalamion turns elegy. But this world that so often seems capricious in its cruelty also shelters apple orchards, glass museums, schoolchildren, century-old sharks; theres no accounting for / all we want to save, no names. Olivers polyphonic gathering of speakers includes lovers and saints, painters and dead poets, a hawk and a mother. In varied forms (ghazals and prose poems, dialogues and erasures, bref double and Golden Shovel, among others) these poems bear witness to and seek reprieve from disasters at once commonplace and terrifying. I cant surface for every scalpel slice, / I need a dreamy estuary present, she writes. Stumbling toward joy across time and space, these poems hum with fear and desire, bewildering loss, and loves lush possibilities.