Exceeds Us
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
Taking its name from a line in Rilke' s second Duino Elegy, " For our own heart always exceeds us," at its core this is a book about new love and underlying illness. A lyric pursuit of our existence among the natural world, these poems keep in mind that existence is transient. They straddle reality lines, often stepping over into dream spaces or pushing against a linear world. But they are solidly of this world, its ground and various bodies of water, where a boy can become a field and a girl can drown in the rivers of her own body. At once intimate— " I would know you in someone else' s life, someone else' s storm cellar" — and expansive— " We rape the landscape/ we can see, start with what covers the light" — Osowski is a poet of language, of notice, and of inquiry. Rilke writes, " Wasn't love and departure placed so gently on shoulders that it seemed to be made of a different substance than in our world?" Exceeds Us is interested in that substance and the notion that our lives are not singular. These poems exceed the pair at their center, they exceed the one life we' re granted, and they are not bound to the laws of our earth. " Prove how weather is not a god and I'll believe in you the rest of my life."
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Love, illness, and the natural world are central to the expansive world Osowski (hover over her) crafts in this ruminative outing. Appropriately, the book takes its title from a line in Rilke's second Duino Elegy—"For our own heart always exceeds us"—capturing the scope of feeling Osowski mines in poems that use white space to create a visual rhythm and evoke the jaggedness of thought. The opening poem, "Temporally," speaks to her interest in the ephemeral and mutable self: "I want to change enough times/ as to be hardly/ recognizable as mammal./ Sweet fin-legged future, with your salt skin and baleen teeth, beat me/ against the reef, force a different mode of breathing." Aquariums, fish, and distorted views are motifs that appear elsewhere, as in the syntactically dynamic poem "Like a Gill Becomes a Scar," which opens: "Amphibian means two lives/ they drink through their skin/ mouths closed I fill// John's water glass past/ the top he lowers face/ sips the rise off the rim." These memorable pages are full of richly imagined descriptions that stir and unsettle the reader.
