Sign-In
Cart
The River Won't Hold You
Paperback
Series: Osu Journal Award Poetry
ISBN13: 9780814251898
Publisher: Ohio State University Press
Published: Dec 1 2014
Pages: 74
Weight: 0.35
Height: 0.30 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Haunting and haunted, The River Won't Hold You navigates loneliness and loss with a quiet, relentless clarity. In poems shaped at the uneasy crossroads of imagination and lived experience, Karin Gottshall searches for solace in the charged spaces between them. I tell myself I can be content with the pleasures / permitted ghosts, she writes in Afterlife, but my body wakes up / leaking saltwater, and won't let my ghost-self be.
Across the collection, poetic structure and the music of language become vessels for memory, philosophy, and ache. Generous in their formal range and attentive to both sound and silence, these poems resist tidy answers. The beauty of Gottshall's work arises from the steadiness of her gaze, and the startling precision of the images it lands on:
Wide-open, staring eyes of the tiger / I drew and had to destroy because it wouldn't sleep.
The River Won't Hold You shows how the places we fear most--the gaps, the afterlives, the undefinable spaces--can also be the ones that hold us.
Also in
General Poetry
Dante's Vita Nuova, New Edition: A Translation and an Essay
Pitavy, Francois
Alighieri, Dante
Paperback
Sounding the Seasons Enlarged Edition: One Hundred and Ten Sonnets for the Christian Year
Guite, Malcolm
Paperback
They Bloom Because of You: Poems on the Infinite Love, Growth, and Magic of Motherhood
Urlichs, Jessica
Paperback
Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way
Lao Tzu
Le Guin, Ursula K.
Paperback
This Is the Main Event: Discovering the Life You Long for in the Life You Have
Smith, Joshua Luke
Hardcover
Ariel: The Restored Edition: A Facsimile of Plath's Manuscript, Reinstating Her Original Selection and Arrangement
Plath, Sylvia
Paperback