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With formal rigor and a real sense of pleasure in the act of experiment and making, Spruijt-metz works into questions both existential and pragmatic, somehow bringing us to the space where the human-animal and the divine don\'t so much reckon with one and other as reveal themselves as each other\'s yearning and, often,.
These are but a few of the gifts poet Donna Spruijt-metz offers us in her wonderful book of poems, General Release from THE Beginning OF THE WORLD. -Danusha Laméris The gift of attention, the gift of self-knowledge, the gift of never looking away and always taking the reader to the source of deepest wounds and hard-fought healing.
The real work, these poems proclaim, is taming the whirring/ distance between us-/ Come close.
Intimate and holy, stripped down to their most essential moving parts, they bring us into their World of kinetic curiosity and restless grief. -Carl Phillips The poems in this collection show it is possible for a poet to be in direct conversation with God, herself, and us, the readers, as if we were all sitting down at the same table, passing the salt.
These impressive poems will, too.
These brave poems prove their own way forward to the difficult doubleness of truth: it can set you free, but, first, it\'ll break your heart. [R]eel me through, catch me/on the other side/with YOUR hidden hands, says Spruijt-Metz, addressing a deity as elusive as her father himself.
Donna Spruijt-metz riffs on the very Psalms that she also interrogates, seeking answers from a genderless, nameless deity here referred to only as YOU-answers to the question of hauntedness (the endless repetition/of the first loss), of what it means to be haunted by a father\'s death, by a mother\'s lies about that death.
What People Are Saying Stitched equally with wit, tenderness, and the grace of longing, the poems of General Release from THE Beginning OF THE World reinvigorate the metaphysical tradition for our still-new century.
She examines shifting relationships with the holy, referred to in the book only as \'YOU.\' She asks: Do YOU hear/a whisper/in YOUR//constant night/-and then listen? She breaks her own heart to touch yours.
In General Release from THE Beginning OF THE WORLD, Donna Spruijt-metz attempts to reconcile the death of the father, the lies of the mother, a hidden half-sister, and the love for a daughter-with the impossible desire to banish the past from the present.
Series Editor: Jon Thompson.
Free Verse Editions
