Swallowed Light
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Ocean Vuong meets Natalie Diaz in dreamlike, blood-soaked verse that explores the cost of memory and mourning.
Swallowed Light begins at the opened clearing of myth, at the mouth of history. In his breathtaking debut poetry collection, Michael Wasson writes into the gaps left by a legacy of erasure—the wholly American fracture of colonialism—where the indigenous tongue is determined to bloom against its own vanishing. These poems mourn and build with pattern and intricacy, intuition and echo, calling ocean and heartbreak and basalt, monsters and bullets and bones, until they form one vibrant song.
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"It has darkened here only because the light is inside/ the room," Wasson observes in one of the characteristic studies of perception in his meditative debut. The book's opening poem, "Aposiopesis ," refers to a hitch or break in speech, which leaves what comes after it unsaid. Fittingly, this collection draws its shape around holes and tunnels, the vulnerability of feeling overcome, the legacy of violence, and the honesty required for truly stating one's feelings: "Are you honest enough to say You've ever/ loved?" Shaped out of contemplation, mourning, and a desire for renewal, these poem carefully build as they consider their subjects. One poem instructs, "Carve the wind apart/ into one single/ lasting answer," which serves as a motif for the poet's own lyric exploration of light, boyhood, and nimipuutímt language and storytelling. A late poem ends with ascendancy, having "let my last/ eye open." These deeply felt pages offer a bold tapestry of imagery and thought.
