salvage
Black Lawrence Press, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-62557-947-8
$15.95
In
her gorgeous new collection, salvage, Kristy Bowen builds an
associative world, where details intensify and dissipate like the sea.
Haunted and mysterious, lush and encompassing, this word is wet-often
submerged, scaled, salt-washed. The poems within it bob and sink as they
explore love and disconnection, “the riptide / pull of strange, lonely
dogs and broken phone lines.”
-Ruth Foley
Salvage-meaning
to save and rescue, meaning to recoup and reclaim, but also the ship
and lost cargo, the payment made to a person who has done the saving.
Such two-sided meaning swims through the Kristy Bowen’s salvage, a book
that warns of lakes where, “It is foolish to love that which has freed
you. Or that which you save.” Near such waters mermaids hunger for
pretzel rolls and claw-footed tubs, ghosts thirst for trapdoors and
dimestores, and houses make for broken promises and kisses in our palest
places. We’re assured, “It will be comfortable, but a midwestern sort
of comfortable, subject to wind and weather at all times.” This is a
wild, mercurial place where antelope eat abacus trees, voices build
structures from plastic spoons, and birds nest inside the body’s box, a
place of touch and comfort, love and strangeness, where what we salvage
salvages us in this bright new collection.
-Laura Madeline Wiseman
With
her knack for marrying the disparate with the savvy, the corporeal with
the fragile, Bowen breathes life into creatures both familiar and
fantasmic. These poems are drenched with imagery so vivid that they seem
to breathe and ache, and the menagerie so real that I half-expected to
find fur stuck to every page. From dimestores to rabbits and clavicles
to goldfish, in salvage Kristy Bowen has exquisitely crafted story-poems
that invite the reader to linger on every delicious syllable.
-Sina Evans
reviews
Salvage offers
a provocative take on this framing of repetition as subtle violence, as
necessary devastation. We are offered a vision of the self as
inherently unstable, a self that is destroyed over and over again, only
to emerge more luminous and more fierce.
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