High Ground Coward
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- $25.99
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- $25.99
Publisher Description
Alicia Mountain’s urgent and astonishing debut collection maps a new queer landscape through terrain alive and sensual, defiant and inviting. With a voice that beckons while it howls, Mountain nimbly traverses lyric, confessional, and narrative modes, leaving groundbreaking tracks for us to follow. High Ground Coward offers fists full of soil, leftovers for breakfast, road trip as ritual, twins of lovers and twins of ourselves. This world blooms with hunger-inducing detail, its speakers asking us to consider what it will take to satisfy our own appetites while simultaneously trying to nourish one another. “Ferocious, even the softest part,” Mountain shows us “a way to fall in love with wanting,” leaving us “ravenous, but gradually.”
Bearing witness to identity formation in solitude and communion, High Ground Coward is an almanac of emotional and relational seasons. Mountain’s speakers question the meaning of inheritance, illness, violence, mythology, and family architecture. Whether Mountain is at work revealing the divinity of doubt, the entanglement of devotion, or the dominion that place holds over us, High Ground Coward heralds a thrilling poetic debut.
From “Scavenger”
We three eat food and are in love. This is the easy way to say
there are stores beneath the floor.
Potatoes and shallots,
hard-necked garlic streaked purple,
jars beside jars, themselves
each staving globes of suction.
Preservation, a guardian hunger.
In the evening I whisper to the boiled beet,
like a naked organ in my flushed hand:
You are ground blood,
you are new born,
you have never been nothing—
thawfruit seedflower greenstart rootbulb
handpull shedscrub mouthsweet
and again.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In search of stable ground, Mountain crosses terrain as foreboding as her name in her Iowa Poetry Prize winning debut. "I became reliant/ on potting soil. I kept forty pounds/ in my trunk as a more hopeful sandbag," proclaims Mountain's speaker, a queer lover, fighter, and seeker. The poems often signal an understanding of purpose and utility ("I am not funny at parties, but I'm good with the leftovers") while maintaining a consistent momentum. The collection's strongest poems are those that convey concrete details about places, often magnificent and precarious landscapes: cliffs, steep hillsides, alpine passes piled with snow that are impossible to pass without tire chains. Attention to domesticity marks the work's flip side: "NPR in the kitchen and a woman who is impressed/ every time I make the salad dressing." In one long poem, cribbage becomes a metaphor for family-making and relationship-building. Here, the tension between wild and domestic can be evinced amid an awareness of fight-or-flight impulses: "I know we've got animals in us like a house on fire./ They smell the smoke and they're digging at the doorframe." Exhibiting a strong voice and a knack for intimate detail, Mountain delivers a collection that "Paints you in colors./ Leaves you half dead."
