Afforded Permanence

Knowledge reverberates. What we’ve known, what we’ve been taught, what we thought we once knew. The weight of knowledge can be a burden, yet in Liam Day’s debut collection, how we learn informs how we function. The paths Day’s narrator travels, routes learned by rote, give way to impressions of his life, of Boston and its surrounding cities, and the ways their history entwines with his own. Through a series of intricate, interwoven images—genealogy, tesseracts, Vitruvian men—Day’s narrator lends us his memory, recollections that travel from Boston to London to Ireland and back. His hard-won insights evoke what we gain from impermanence, bring to mind wounds when we’re looking at scars.