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“To remember is to generate a clutch of cold-water embryos” is just one of the many brilliant musings on memory in the latest collection by one of our most imaginative poets, Anne-Adele Wight. To delve into the deep psyche via anamnesis requires bravery and skill, and each poem boldly rings both. Wight conquers the deep unknown, the unconscious, trauma memory, and the sea, and her generosity allows us to venture with her. Not only do we experience a poet’s journey, but in the book’s second-person narration the reader enters the pulse of each poem. In this way, the book is healing––reading it can help us find the wounded places that may need salve. Each word can be felt in the body, enacting a somatic release of tired patterns and splits. Within the “ribbon flow,” the “alarm clock” sounds the “depth charge” to deliver the “frenzied motherlode.” To walk away from the past can bring unsettling nostalgia, but this book is way to sense all memory anew, to reawaken from the “unfathomable center,” allowing the “alphabet” to make sense of the “pasted reconstructions.” With this, Wight helps us see “the way out”––“the door that hides blue fire.”
––Debrah Morkun, author of The Ida Pingala
Science meets the surreal in the spectacular jewel-toned prose poems of Anne-Adele Wight’s Blue Driftwood Fire. Her poems amaze and disturb with existential and psychological pressures. While the exact nature of the pressures remains ambiguous and open to interpretation, the poems entrance with their eerie splendor. They speak through deep-sea, subterranean, and volcanic imagery. Their marine and underground spaces may be gem-encrusted caves or frigid deeps caught “in the eternal complex of underwater candles.” In all the fraught wonderment of this collection, we find a charm, a beloved little toy horse, perhaps a totem from childhood, perhaps a toy retrieved through fantasy. Reader, go with Wight through these stunning spaces. She will descend with you and ultimately lift you skyward.
––Lynn Levin, author of House Parties and The Minor Virtues
Wight restlessly makes and remakes the world out of the basic elements of carbon, fire, water, in a language of myth where things find themselves shifting constantly into other things: “You climb the stairway into a trench that leads down from the bottom of the sea. Everything below the surface is upended.” Blue Driftwood Fire is a fresh, surprising, immersive, visionary book: upended in the best possible way.
––John Wall Barger, author of Resurrection Pie
Anne-Adele Wight is the author of four previous poetry collections, all from BlazeVOX. She has published and performed her work widely and is active on the Philadelphia poetry scene.
Book Information:
· Paperback: 76 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 978-1-60964-531-1
$18
