Set in the temperate rainforest of Southeast Alaska and the Pacific Coast, Grayling moves through the interior wilderness of a woman shaped by and inhabiting the rough country of her upbringing. These trim, lyric poems, structurally and syntactically fresh, follow a compelling narrative thread as the poet writes back into her circle a father who was both threat and savior, a sister who died too young, and herself as mother. Fish, plant life, the specific NW coastal landscape, memory, and experience weave together as Grayling straddles the faultline between past and present.
My sister ironed her dress
on a bath towel laid over the walnut table.
Heat lifted the varnish and shaped
a milk cloud of a missing girl.
November tides flushed blue
clay and cobbles from beneath the deck,
saltwater freezing to creosote pilings like pitch.
Curly dark-haired dog, a salmon-catcher
with a retriever’s soft mouth, and she,
third from our mother’s womb.
The baneberry grew like a prophet.
Behind the outhouse, we nailed
siding in a Sitka spruce, a platform
big enough for a sleeping bag and book.
Above us, scolding, the red
squirrel with a turquoise tumor
like a jewel piercing its eyelid.
Listen to “In the House on Gastineau Channel,” “What Her Father Cast,” and “Sedna at the Juneau Cold Storage Dock,” read by Jenifer Browne Lawrence at Perugia Press’s 20th anniversary celebration at Smith College on November 12, 2016: