Whethering, by
Rusty Morrison
Winner of the 2004 Colorado Prize for Poetry
Final judge, Forrest Gander
“In agile
lines that canyon-open, exposing
an unfashionable, edgy sinceritas, Rusty
Morrison explores the intertwining
of life and language in quiet, gorgeous
meditations inflected by barn swallows. Whethering leads
us into a shapely attentiveness
to those particular others—human,
animal, vegetal—that situate
our affectual and perceptual
experience and call us to find our ‘way
again and again/ outside
the one thing—.’ With
trenchant political and philosophical
repercussions, Morrison’s poems
cut through the constraints of systematic
thought to articulate gestural meanings,
powerful rivulets of suggestion and
sensibility that reopen the world
and wound of being.”
—Forrest Gander, final judge, and author of Torn Awake and Science & Steepleflower |
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THIS BOOK
 |
 Rusty
Morrison co-won the 2003 Poetry Society of
America’s Robert H. Winner Award and
also the Five Fingers Review Poetry
Award. Her poems have appeared in Boston
Review, Conjunctions, New American Writing,
Pleiades, and elsewhere. Editor and co-publisher
of Omnidawn Publishing, she is also a contributing
editor for Poetry Flash and
a co-editor for 26, a journal
of poetry and poetics affiliated with the
Saint Mary’s College MFA Program.
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“Whethering demands
that its reader wake into what are already
only the traces of language’s making. From
its first page, this book variously implores
and compels language to move from desire
to the real, ‘the hind leg of every
thought / always crouched, / a leap / to
outlast the visible / -this stalking sky.’ This
trying ‘to fix / with intention’ is
a dangerous endeavor, but Morrison is alert,
gutsy, and agile.”
—Elizabeth Robinson, author of Apprehend and Pure Descent
“What happens when the sensual
world interacts with the word, when knowledge
bows gratefully to perception, is Whethering.
Such a brief, rare, unexpected music ensues: ‘the
artery/ of a lark's cry.’”
—Gillian
Conoley, author of Lovers in the Used
World and Beckon
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