Black Trees (Paperback or Softback)

The elusive guide appearing and disappearing throughout this book has put to the poet the challenge she once put to herself, “Can I,” Emily Dickinson asked, “expound the skies?” Black Trees, mingling doubt, imaginative daring, speculative grandeur and fierce attention to the sky, the earth, and weather that unites them, does just that. In this masterful new series of sequences Mossin’s long lines give way to spare, exquisite observations. The simplest fact quietly stated advances a cosmic drama, one where light, shadow, wind from the east or west, birds, intimations of personal devastation, and eruptions of sacred memory, compose the cadence of the day, of any day in the world of these poems, its skies wavering with whatever’s coming next. Mossin’s spare, seemingly notational lines, always on the edge of revelation, can stop you cold, mid-page, in wonder.

Joseph Donahue

Andrew Mossin is the author of The Epochal Body (Singing Horse Press), The Veil (Singing Horse Press) and Exile's Recital (Spuyten Duyvil); and a book of critical prose, Male Subjectivity and Poetic Form in "New American" Poetry (Palgrave). He is an Assistant Professor in the Intellectual Heritage Program at Temple University.