Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door 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

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Rise and Float: Poems

Rise and Float: Poems

Tierney, Brian

Paperback

Series: Jake Adam York Prize

General Poetry

Publisher Price: $16.00

ISBN10: 1571315195
ISBN13: 9781571315199
Publisher: Milkweed Editions
Published: Feb 8 2022
Pages: 80
Weight: 0.30
Height: 0.50 Width: 5.40 Depth: 8.40
Language: English
Chosen by Randall Mann as a winner of the Jake Adam York Prize, Brian Tierney's Rise and Float depicts the journey of a poet working--remarkably, miraculously--to make our most profound, private wounds visible on the page.

With the corpse of Frost under his heel, Tierney reckons with a life that resists poetic rendition. The transgenerational impact of mental illness, a struggle with disordered eating, a father's death from cancer, the loss of loved ones to addiction and suicide--all of these compound to month after / month and dream / after dream of struck-through lines. Still, Tierney commands poetry's cathartic potential through searing images: wallpaper peeling like wrist skin when a grater slips, a laugh as good as a scream, pears as hard as a tumor. These poems commune with their ghosts not to overcome, but to release.

The course of Rise and Float is not straightforward. Where one poem gently confesses to trying, these days, to believe again / in people, another concedes that defeat / sometimes is defeat / without purpose. Look: the chair is just a chair. But therein lies the beauty of this collection: in the proximity (and occasional overlap) of these voices, we see something alluringly, openly human. Between a boy torn open by dogs and a suicide, two beautiful teenagers are kissing. Between screams, something intimate--hope, however difficult it may be.

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