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New Poetry from 2022 Judith E. Wilson Fellow in Poetry at Cambridge University.

Here is a glorious wading tour of the infinite, the natural, and their relationship to human art-making on multiple registers: musical, linguistic, textilic/material. Tricks of perception turn landscapes and city vistas into painted surfaces, playing with scale and illusions of mastery. Text melts into texture and sound then morphs back again.

If 'a turn in the path or the crossroads is the intersection between the ancestors and the living, ' then BRILLIANT CORNERS, riffing on Monk's ornate, inventive austerity and braiding it with many other voices, is a meeting of not only with human lineage but also with elemental and material lineage, likewise both ancestral and living.

An ocean of language ebbs and floods in wide swaths of print as the pages turn here like waves, though the ocean's history with land is presumably far vaster than human language's history in the world. The language of the ocean, of Earth's formation, permeates this volume that begins over and over again, as its human language revels in its own shortcomings. 'My freedom is so much the greater and more meaningful the more narrowly I limit my field of action and the more I surround myself with obstacles.' Here is a glorious wading tour of the infinite, the natural, and their relationship to human art-making on multiple registers: musical, linguistic, textilic/material. Tricks of perception turn landscapes and city vistas into painted surfaces, playing with scale and illusions of 'mastery.' Text melts into texture and sound then morphs back again.

'After you finish with the/cotton [chopping or picking] you go back to quilting. I sit down and hold my hands, and I feel bad. I do my quilt pieces and go to sewing and I feel all right.' Intimations of human labor, backbreaking and lifegiving, repetition as in/folding. Beautiful writing joins the oceanic with the text/ilic as 'a tufted quilt with minimal ripple, ' finding the cosmos in a single formal configuration (medallion on quilt, ripple on ocean, riff on piano). Blakean, Mackeyan, and Monkean visions and more abound, folding the human into the elemental and material worlds in which we move and make, and which cofoundationally move and make us.-- Maria Damon

Poetry. Art. Women's Studies.