The poems in Sweet Husk move between the living and the dead, seeking connection with and through the past, often via the act of digging and excavation. Here, poetry and archaeology reflect one another: what is buried provides insight into—or, conversely, deepens the mystery of—the ways we engage with the world. The poems are full of matter, of things that matter—artifacts and animals—and build on pattern, series, and echoes, that focus on making/remaking from what is broken, dead, unsung, or left behind. We see how strange, small, and lonely our lives are—dwarfed by our place in a vast landscape of both topography and time. We see how little we can know about ourselves, even with dedicated cataloguing and search. Finally, Sweet Husk concerns itself with our human place in the narrative of the earth.
On the table, a heap of sweet
potatoes, holes chewed
through the skin of some.
Wedge of orange meat
where a mole encountered
it underground: star-flesh
at the end of his nose bumping
straight into the subterranean
mother lode, blindly caressing
the tuber with the branched
mitts of his hands, scenting out
its complicated rough contours,
dusky odor of the roots’
snarl, gnawing into the soft
fibers which he can’t know
are the shade of a harvest moon
low on the horizon. He eats
awed, but when he leads
the other moles here to share
the gift, line of them shuffling
in the tunnel, vein teeming with dark
blood toward a heart, there is only
an empty socket, a room whose walls
are soil, faintly fragrant.
Listen to “Remains,” “The Evolution of Nightmare,” “The Comte de Buffon Composes a Nasty Note to Thomas Jefferson Regarding His Recurring Nightmares of the American Moose,” and “Once, in College, My Father Played Horatio,” read by Corrie Williamson at Smith College on December 7, 2014:
Listen to “Tapetum Lucidum,” read by Corrie Williamson at Perugia Press’s 20th anniversary celebration at Smith College on November 12, 2016:
Finalist for the 2015 Library of Virginia Award for Poetry