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
The Bridge

The Bridge

Speaker, Mary Austin

Paperback

General Poetry

ISBN10: 1848614675
ISBN13: 9781848614673
Publisher: Shearsman Books
Published: Jan 8 2016
Pages: 108
Weight: 0.29
Height: 0.26 Width: 5.25 Depth: 8.00
Language: English
Poetry. Suspended between home and the city, which glows abstractly in the background, THE BRIDGE is a timely book in this age when commutes and device-driven inwardness consumes so much of our days. At times casual and at times earnest, the attention to time and color, bodies and motion, bring heft to these svelte, track-like poems. The conceptual form of the poems echoes that of a train ride--the seemingly mundane opening and closing of the same doors, but at the exit, one is never in the same place as she was in the beginning. Speaker's poems transport readers so deftly, it's quite easy forget just how it was that you arrived.--Kyle Dargan

Transit becomes an act of transcendence in Mary Austin Speaker's THE BRIDGE. I love how each section of the book ends almost where it begins, how the world comes as it goes, fl ash after fl ash&8212;and just when things begin to blur we 'awake to astonishing / geometry, ' to an awareness that 'ascent is only a way / toward another opening.' THE BRIDGE limns with unmatched grace the internal and external process of daily passage.--Joseph Massey

Most everything happens around us while we are in between, suspended in our own stories, and ill-prepared to be surprised. Mary Austin Speaker's THE BRIDGE honors the potential for magic as unknowns bump up against one another during the beginnings and endings of so many everyday days: '[I]t is not grace that opens / to let us burrow in / it's a chaos of reordering / which of these / is the obstacle / to understanding / how the magic happens.' In these pages, we commute through the always now and the always almost, unfathomably lucky to have a skilled poet willing to look very directly and say I see you, riding in the seat next to us.--Paula Cisewski

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