Bøger i Colorado Prize for Poetry serien

"If we are always at war, is all poetry then war poetry? Adrian Lèurssen's Human Is to wander is a book of dislocation, migration, and witness at a time of war-but whose war, fought where, and at what costs to whom? Born and raised in apartheid-era South Africa, Lèurssen migrated to the U.S. as a teen in order to avoid military service at a time when the country's authoritarian regime engaged in a protracted, largely unknown war in Angola. Years later, as a father of young children in his adopted country, echoes of everything his family thought they had left behind has returned: endless bloody conflicts on the horizon; an alarming rise of authoritarianism and nationalistic fervor; pervasive racism, inequality, and daily violence in a country whose mythic promise was once held as freedom, equality, opportunity. In Human Is to wander, Lèurssen explores these echoes of his personal history within a landscape that is familiar and unfamiliar all at once. Neither the brutally oppressive South Africa of his childhood nor the precarious United States of today, Lèurssen's landscape emerges in the broken rhyme between "troop" and "troupe" where "our captions / are picture less" and "the plan to explain is absolute, but only an entrance." His is an inner landscape as song no longer sung in a mother tongue, in which the human cost of war, climate crisis, and forced migration is "all part of the explanation." Lèurssen uses collage, constrained cut-up, Oulipean procedures, abecedarian, and other generative play to allow poems to emerge that respond to the turmoil and dislocation of this violent century, attempting to witness if not understand his-and our-place in it"--

"In Mountain Amnesia, Thompson's poems rebuild a new world-and self-in the wake of destruction and loss. Influenced by the landscape of rural Appalachia, these poems depict a nature relentlessly working on its own disappearance for survival. Decaying plants and animal remains are housed in the same world as ramps and bellflowers on the cusp of blooming. These poems do not placate or cover up the inevitability of death, but rather use this knowledge to seek connection and make meaning: "how little and yet / how much it matters to count the dead." Mountain Amnesia seeks a path through destruction, using ruin to clear the way for new beginnings; or, as Thompson writes, "the painful, florid bloom of passing forward." This collection is a testament to survival and resilience, and animal encounters - the lonely fox, the folded fawn, the returning whale, the emerging voles - become new myths along the way. Mountain Amnesia also explores the question of how implicated or dependent we are on the lives and actions of others. What does it mean to be accountable to and responsible for those around you? How are we implicated in others' crimes? What can we do in the aftermath? The poems in this collection explore the limits of knowing and seeing, and how we come to be known and seen: "I ask the world for its bandage /of meaning." Mountain Amnesia both pursues and surrenders to these limits of knowing, narrowing the vast distances between ourselves and others"--