Riddle Field
Poems
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- USD 16.99
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- USD 16.99
Descripción editorial
Winner of the 2019 Interim Test Site Poetry Series Prize
“Dew is an exciting and complex new voice in contemporary poetry.” —Publisher’s Weekly
The beautifully crafted poems in Riddle Field explore two parallel themes, the impact of the impending destruction of a dam on a small town and the trauma of sexual abuse and eventual recovery from it. This work focuses on the environment, human and physical, in which the loss of nature and innocence is born and calls attention to the many ways we create both intimacy and distance when trauma is hidden or denied. Derek Thomas Dew’s language is harsh, honest, and sometimes heartbreaking. His poems capture the confusion and fatigue that must be navigated for a victim of abuse to piece himself back together and the internal strife that comes with carry-ing a traumatic secret that can no longer be ignored.
Rich with unforgettable images and the quiet strength of hard-won survival, Riddle Field tackles the complex process of achieving self-awareness and recovery in the wake of profound trauma.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Dew debuts with a thought-provoking contemplation of the role of memory in shaping the present moment. In sweeping, Whitmanesque lines, the poems read as a conversation between a past and present self, or a dialogue between parts of consciousness. "I've hated that creek since I was three apples high. It's incapable," the speaker writes in response to his own description of a creek in the poem's opening line. Dew's innovative approach to polyvocality relies less on exposition or narration than on his choices in form. "And if the hill is still blue smoke when the snow climbs to counters, we'll surely freeze," his speaker warns the character who voiced the preceding, nonitalicized line. Throughout, Dew engages ambitious philosophical questions while building narrative tension, maintaining a riveting sort of mystery: "the moon outside, an unknowing." By leaving much unsaid, the collection cultivates and sustains an aura of inventive possibility. Dew is an exciting and complex new voice in contemporary poetry.
