Beyond the Chainlink

Poetry. Morrison writes: "Beyond the chainlink, a city is the union between two lovers, never taking place." In this latest collection, her eye is attuned to the ways language both obscures and exposes the seemingly lucid illusions of intimate attraction. How to recognize the past's specters as they beckon and frighten, haunt and call, from just outside the "chainlink" of one's schoolyard expectations of self and other? Though Morrison may assert how impossible it is to escape the constructed frame of past experience, her gift for nuance makes each achingly exposed limitation permeable to our attention. She reports, "Impulse says a little hurt is worth the long, thin fracturing you can use as horizon."

Rusty Morrison is the author of BEYOND THE CHAINLINK (Ahsahta Press, 2014), THE TRUE KEEPS CALM BIDING ITS STORY (2008), which won the 2007 Ahsahta Press Sawtooth Poetry Prize, the Academy of American Poet's James Laughlin Award, the Northern California Book Award, and the DiCastagnola Award from Poetry Society of America, as well as three other books. AFTER URGENCY (2012) won the Tupelo Press Dorset Prize; BOOK OF THE GIVEN (2011) is available from Noemi Press; and WHETHERING (Center for Literary Publishing, 2004) won the Colorado Prize for Poetry. She has received the Bogin, Hemley, Winner, and DiCastagnola Awards from PSA. Her poems and/or essays have appeared or will appear in A Pubic Space, American Poetry Review, Aufgabe, Boston Review, Gulf Coast, Kenyon Review, Lana Turner, Pleiades, Spoon River, The Volta's Evening Will Come, VOLT and elsewhere. Her poems have been anthologized in the Norton Postmodern American Poetry 2nd Edition, The Arcadia Project: Postmodern Pastoral, Beauty is a Verb, and The Sonnets: Translating and Rewriting Shakespeare and elsewhere. She has been co-publisher of Omnidawn since 2001.