Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Nowhere Was a Lake

Nowhere Was a Lake

Draft, Margaret

Paperback

General Poetry

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 1954245882
ISBN13: 9781954245884
Publisher: Four Way Books
Published: Mar 15 2024
Pages: 90
Weight: 0.36
Height: 0.02 Width: 6.16 Depth: 9.01
Language: English
Captivated by the simultaneously routine and disruptive nature of violence and desire, Nowhere Was a Lake marks a luminous debut from poet Margaret Draft. What do you do when a horse dies? / You hollow out the land, // you try to make enough space, / and when you think you have enough, // keep digging. In these poems, our own tenderness endangers us, and yet -- when faced with the enormity of our hunger, an appetite that proclaims both the bounty of nourishment and our capacity for loss -- Draft keeps digging. He said this because // he himself had to enter the hole / with the horse and shovel, // shift the legs, reposition the head. The speaker here has an unflinching pragmatism, a characteristic that paradoxically makes her emotions all the more tangible. This is how you prospect a grave, she seems to say, but you'll be in it, too. You with your body among the other bodies. Draft rejects simple binaries, insisting that oblivion can be a place, that fidelity and betrayal can coexist in our most intimate relationships, that to live as a human animal means embodying both hunter and prey. Deft in its exploration of female sexuality, the emotional complexity of polyamory, and the distinction between freedom and abandonment, Nowhere Was a Lake mesmerizes with its erotic pastorals and frank prose poems. Edge interrogates the dialectic of trust structuring romantic relationships and negotiated through sexual physics: It is not a question of whether you will / harm me, but whether you will / stick around long enough / to hold me when I am harmed. The risk and reward of such exploration is uncertainty: anything could happen, but anything could happen. In no place, going someplace, I know. / There are so few things I can say I know definitively. // But this must be the definition of plenty. / The sun slowly setting over the valley. And, yes, love may wend through the field as we thresh it. And, yes, we are in the light as it goes down.

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