In a careful examination of personal and collective histories, David Keplinger\'s Ice indexes the findings from memory\'s slow melt--stories and faces we\'ve forgotten, bones hidden in frost.
And the flowers open up / their small green trumpets anyway..
But sometimes, out of the snow of confusion, something answers, saying gorgeous things like yes.
The wolf\'s head can\'t, either.
So is there a point to all this singing? Our ancestors cannot answer.
I am sorry / for the parts you gave me / that I\'ve misshapen, Keplinger writes.
A pair of grease-smudged reading glasses calls up a mother\'s phantom.
Climate change melts layers of permafrost to reveal a severed wolf\'s head.
Ice shelves collapse.
With each comes also the discovery of what--and who--we\'ve harmed in the discovering.
With each comes a critique of the Anthropocene, our drive to possess the unpossessable.
Cryptic visitants arrive in the form of Gilgamesh, searching for a way to stay in pain forever; a grandmother mending socks, her face in the dark unchanging
Emily Dickinson, lingering at her window; a lion cub, asleep in ice for millennia.
In these poems, he turns to our predecessors for guidance in picking apart the forces that govern modernity--masculinity, power, knowledge, conquest.
You are asking that same question.
I am asking how much more / I have to learn from this, Keplinger writes.
In a careful examination of personal and collective histories, David Keplinger\'s Ice indexes the findings from memory\'s slow melt--stories and faces we\'ve forgotten, bones hidden in frost
