Risk

“How is it that Rusty Morrison can sound such profundity in the quietest, most ephemeral of life’s moments? Her supple intelligence and disarming vision models for us ways to attend to experience in its ever-deepening complexity, yielding congeries of meaning and feeling. Durable revelation after durable revelation are tossed, like pebbles, into the poems’ currents. ‘Can you write what isn’t known to you? Will lyric hear it?’ These lyrics hold life’s limitless unknowability, and the depth of what remains hidden to us, in plain view. Morrison’s means for coaxing forth astonishments is stunning.”—Jenny Xie “Most of the breath-stopping poems in Risk are defined by strong lineal caesuras— as though the poems were torn open to show ‘the deaths you carry within.’ And yet, the dominant theme of Risk is bonding—the bonding of a couple, ‘Ken’ and ‘you,’ and the bonding that language might engender. Emphasizing the latter, Morrison asks, ‘Could words come that would kin you to others…?’ Staggering the conventional fluidity of iambic pentameter, her caesuras generate a meditative pause that serves her characteristically philosophical questioning. Morrison’s poems have always struck me with their seriousness, with their aversion to irony, and with their ecstatic merging of abstraction and particularity. Risk is especially concerned with a neglected trajectory of identity politics, one which reminds us of the mutability of identity and its collaborative constructs in our interactions with others and with the world itself.—Forrest Gander