Like the Appalachian mountain setting from which Gloss arises, the language in this collection is in flux, full of paradox and thresholds, each word and line a peak or a range. The poems are mined from the ruptured and fragmented rock and dirt of the colloquial, creating a kind of “landguage” or “langscape.” Indeed, the poems (mis)behave like little ecosystems, in which word-play, rhyme, and enjambment simultaneously make and break sense, join and repel—evoking the tensions between progress and resistance. Embedded among the strata of Gloss is loss: many poems respond to mountaintop removal coal mining, which is literally flattening the rich complexity of the Appalachian landscape and culture. As the poems give voice to the mountain-top, they consider the delicate relationship between humans and nature, lover and beloved, as well as the natural complexity of communication and utterance, the struggle to say the unsayable.
Wild sarsaparilla is the fool’s sang.
Follow jack-in-the-pulpit, goldenseal,
cohoshes black and blue. To find true heal-all,
fall head-over, get brave, get fangled up
in bobcat mouths or caves, and wrangle twang
and drawl from fiddleheads into a single
clear-cut note. Then forage through the leaf-
like chiming, sundried light. Hear me, stranger?
Feel it pull you underground, elide
you—forest-body, heart, and mind—to root,
moving through the dirt, a shape like a person.
You are wherewithal and you are wild.
—jack-in-the-pulpit, goldenseal,
cohoshes black and blue—
You are real and dream and dissolute.
I mean you are a tangle and a song.
Listen to “Ginseng,” “Soil,” “Point Blank,” and “Casserole,” read by Ida Stewart at Perugia Press’s 20th anniversary celebration at Smith College on November 12, 2016:
Author photograph by Wayne Bellamy
