“How incandescent the language is, each line emitting light through the membrane of time and anticipated grief. The work has a rigorousness, the poet pushing through the ache of experience from the first to the last word.”—Dionne Brand

In her signature epic vision, Canisia Lubrin distills a radiant elegy for her mother along an interwoven and unresolvable axis of astonishment, belonging as much to history as to today. Grief, tender and searing, is the channel through which the poet refracts the realm of contemporary life to reveal the blistering paradox of its private and public entanglements. This is poetry of haunting gravity and resonance, with meditations on love, time, and loss, at once meticulously far-seeing, interior, and inexpressible.

woman from fine-print time, disclose to the world:
        the forecast of our noontime births outdoors; how I distrust
every form of authority, chiefly my own astonishment
        this poisoned wish is why I love, I bow to deserts,
these claychildren of forests everywhere  
        I love the rain, this is no secret, I love the solar wind;  
hold their elliptical life in the wasteland of our third mouths
        where flowers are invisible and bones are sanded and amusing,
and every heliopause cloud senses our head, how we astonish
        our memories vining where no shade is enough,
since many who’ll feed me will refuse me their names,
        and good, who knows what bargains I would make
with their meanings, more bundles of thyme . . .
        tournaments of family recipes with you at my question,