Grand & Arsenal

Grand & Arsenal begins "Bless me I am not myself," but it is not long before the probability of being blessed is revealed to be as remote as the concept of a whole self. Thus begins the book's defining struggle, enacted by a multitude of voices which move from rush to stumble and back again-meanwhile using all the tools we as a culture use to hold fear at arm's length.

We hear a familiar irony, as in "On a trip West, porn in the hotel room. I can take or leave it. The climax that puts me in the seats? World's end." We hear humor, as in "I believed in . . . / . . . a certain apocalypse not so much foretold as crafted / by large-brained monkeys." We hear understatement, as in "knowing it does not matter / in the grand-she would say scheme, I would say / mishap-." Most importantly, though, these poems allow for the fleeting triumph of an undefended voice, which appears often to emerge tentatively from a sort of exhausted collapse.

Kerri Webster is the author of a previous full-length collection, We Do Not Eat Our Hearts Alone (2005), as well as two chapbooks: Psalm Project (2009) and Rowing Through Fog (2003). Writer in Residence at Washington University in St. Louis from 2006 to 2010, she currently lives and writes in her native Idaho.