No Shape Bends The River So Long eBook

WINNER OF THE NEW MEASURE POETRY PRIZE, Selected by CAROLYN FORCHÉ | Free Verse Editions, edited by Jon Thompson | What to make of this grand experiment over months and miles of river by two poets, not oneMonica Berlin and Beth Marzoniplus whatever third spirit theyve invented together? Like music from the 8th century written by Anonymous, that haunting ubiquitous voice, these poems feel unsettlingly interchangeable, keep coming like the countrys longest river dream-documented here in a rich rush, dense with repetition and sorrow by poets who think like a glacier or a stone, sand . . . years / like consistent rain. The Mississippi never had better companions or more devoted ones, save Mark Twain perhaps, or more to the point, his troubled, star-crossed Huck. The sense of human and nonhuman history, even prehistory stuns, keeps bothering this shared-solitary work. Wake to any weather & know that / long ago there also was. Ill take that as rare solace. MARIANNE BORUCH