{ In The Field Between Us – poems – Molly McCully Brown + Susannah Nevison }

In The Field Between Us
Molly McCully Brown + Susannah Nevison
Persea Books, 2020

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It is possible our maker knows we are makerless. What can we do? Pair up, perhaps. Read outwardly, together, this In The Field Between Us, placed so mortally within by poets Molly McCully Brown and Susannah Nevison. Look, I have wanted to write you. But instead I cup my hands by holding this book while elsewhere I clay and call inside its impression of response. Oh body, with your origin stories for mirrors. Oh eye, with your cut of arrival’s winnings. I was wrong to think correspondence would turn one lonely. Here, in a verse predating what is both former and latter, are two as two bringing transport to a standstill. Should I go on? Can I? How pure and wrecked can language be? I can’t say, but start here. There are tools used in this work that don’t exist. I needn’t be whole, but am by them, fixed.

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reflection by Barton Smock

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book is here:
https://www.perseabooks.com/in-the-field-between-us

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Lethal Theater – poems – Susannah Nevison

Lethal Theater
poetry, Susannah Nevison
Mad Creek Books, 2019

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From rib to eye, Susannah Nevison’s Lethal Theater, a work imbued with strippage, weighs itself in revisited origins, devoured middles, and in finales released of their previous conclusions. Pain is a prisoner of the open field and ritual a transience that demands a before. This is a trembling but surefooted verse, touched by peace, and Nevison cuts word from the phrase of the stirred body and forms it as a thing a reader may or may not come to name. Is there a surrogate for death? Is there a god whose existence we should take personally? As a high-schooler, I spent a summer helping out at a local veterinary clinic, and there I held dogs as they were put to sleep. It didn’t always take. This collection starts with the line Consider the cell not as you see it / but as it comes to be. In the reading, I felt I’d been…brought. In further, I learned how a language can refuse deliverance, accept arrival, and facilitate release. We cannot know what death does with our waiting, but we can stand by the coeval art in Lethal Theater, and ask for a deeper light beside which we no longer claim spectacle by our watching alone.

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reflection by Barton Smock

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book is here:
https://ohiostatepress.org/books/titles/9780814255162.html