Termination Dust - Softcover

Mishler, Susanna

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1597099708 ISBN 13: 9781597099707

Publisher: Boreal Books, 2014

Synopsis

Termination dust, the first high-altitude snowfall, marks the end of summer in Alaska. Rooted in the seasons and sense of place, the poems in this collection employ image-driven lyric and dreamlike narrative to grapple with questions of death and belonging. A strange romance between inner and outer landscapes emerges from what increasingly seem like the prayers of an atheist. A tree becomes “a vascular connection/between kingdoms,” and the human eye “a hole/hungry for small beauties.” Full of vivid animal, human, and ghostly encounters, the poems in Termination Dust are a kind of spiritual notebook for the unbeliever, forging their way to an earthbound grace.

About this title

About the Author:

Susanna J. Mishler s poems have appeared in numerous journals, such as The Iowa Review, Mid-American Review, and Kenyon Review Online. She holds an MFA in Poetry from The University of Arizona in Tucson, where she served as a poetry editor for Sonora Review. She s the recipient of a Peter Taylor Fellowship in Poetry at the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop. Susanna is a founder and curator of the Synergies Live Reading and Performance Series in her hometown of Anchorage, Alaska. In addition to her literary pursuits, Susanna works as an electrician."

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Boreal
 
We each became lost here as children. You,
one September. You, the smell of pitch,
the elbowed stalks of grass poking through snow.
 
Some nights I unfolded the attic stairs
and sat under a light, opening boxes,
then carried them to the kitchen. I studied
 
our parents’ faces. Once, Mom sat
on the orange kitchen carpet as if
she’d fallen there, by your boxes. “You ought to,”
 
she said, “fill the wood box,”
looking away. Our baby pictures are so
similar, not even she can guess.
 
I lifted the ax and searched the wood line
for lynx, for moose, for any nodding branch.
I was convinced you would speak.
 
Did you ever see the orchids here,
the heavy pink and yellow on thin stalks?
I press my ear to dirt each June, lie flat
 
to look inside their secret, spotted throats.
Our parents walked together on that trail
behind the shed ― a loose, unmarked seam.
 
Imagine how Dad stood between the trunks that day:
a tin in one hand, the other reaching
to help Mom over fallen trees.

About this edition

• Publisher: Boreal Books
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1597099708
• ISBN 13: 9781597099707
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 104