These prose-poems are about the idea of “inland,” the idea of the prairie: location, self and voice (and race) and what that means in a given place, metaphor, juxtaposition, repetition. (“What’s your body in the set of places?” one poem asks (p 23).) These poems are full of “foxes,” the fact of the animals but also the idea of the dodge, and full of love and Eros, the erotic and how landscape can be or reveal it. (p 11: “It\u2019s that this far inland the appearance of a fox is more reference than metaphor. Or the appearance is a demonstration. Sudden appearance, big like an impulse; or the watcher gains a gradual awareness\u2014in the field, taking shape and, finally, familiar.”)<\/p>\n
“Location’s what you come to; it’s the low point, it usually repeats,” says the first poem (p 3), and later, “Looking back I wanted—I want—to equal the whole prairie” (p 76). I like how Giscombe plays with language, like “the flat center having become my favorite haunt”(p 13) and then, the next page, the speaker having become “a favorite ha’nt (or a favored one).” I like phrases like this (p 22): “I’ve always had a penchant for the place around speech, voice being suddenly absent in the heart of the song, for the flattest part of heat.”<\/p>\n
These are poems about landscape, landscape literally and as metaphor: “An outline’s sameness is, finally, a reference. Towns, at a distance, are that—how they appear at first, a dim cluster, and then from five or six miles off; how they look when you’re only three miles away.” (p 26) or this, “After dark you can always see lights in the distance, no matter how far between towns you get—lights “punctuate” Illinois” (p 67). <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
These prose-poems are about the idea of “inland,” the idea of the prairie: location, self and voice (and race) and what that means in a given place, metaphor, juxtaposition, repetition. (“What’s your body in the set of places?” one poem asks (p 23).) These poems are full of “foxes,” the fact of the animals but […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-230","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=230"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=230"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=230"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=230"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}