The Stack of Owls is Getting Higher

In a sequence of poems set in the mountainous Deep South of America, Dawn Watson vividly evokes an ominous landscape of gas stations, jackrabbits and drifting hawks, where copperhead snakes fall out of branches and magnolia cones / thum[p] the roofs of wooden outhouses. These poems, based on the writers time spent in Georgia, Tennessee and the Carolinas, are interwoven with pieces set in the poets native Belfast which speak urgently to the raw realities of sexuality, juvenile detention, and the Irish border. Many poems feature speakers driving from place to place, capturing the in-between states in which so much of experience is actually lived. Precise and strange images coalesce into physical and interior landscapes. Alternately surreal and direct, and always joyously inventive, Watson offers a clear and unsettling vision of what is and isnt there in these anxious, contemporary times.