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
The Earliest Witnesses

The Earliest Witnesses

Waldrep, G. C.

Paperback

General Poetry

ISBN10: 194648248X
ISBN13: 9781946482488
Publisher: Tupelo Press
Published: Dec 31 2020
Pages: 130
Weight: 0.38
Height: 0.31 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.50
Language: English
In the poems of The Earliest Witnesses, witnesses need a place to begin-they spiral off from a walk, a church, an orchard, to go into deeper meditation about faith, earth, restraint, desire, and violence. Waldrep's seventh collection begins where his prior collection, feast gently, left off: This / is how the witness ends: touch, withdraw; touch again, according to the opening poem. The status of witnesses is never constant and never settled in this book: sometimes, witnesses foster, touch, and stain the places they inhabit; other times, they befriend, or document, or think. Sometimes, witnesses forget themselves-in questions of blame and responsibility-and sometimes they feel forgotten and unknown. If these are poems of witness, then they are also testators to the craft of seeing: Can you see this, the ophthalmologist in A Mystic's Guide to Arches asks over and over again. Here, sight facilitates and impedes desire; it colludes with language itself. She said, When you say pear, I see p-e-a-r for a second before I see, in my mind's eye, a pear, Waldrep carefully records in [West Stow Orchard Poem (II)]. The desire-poems in The Earliest Witnesses want the thing itself, its image of the mind, and the language that transmutes both thing and image into song.

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