A record of visionary experience in the wake of loss
In Lapis, poet Kerri Webster writes into the vast space left by the deaths of three women: her mother, a mentor, and a friend. Using a wide array of lyric forms and meditations, Webster explores matrilineages both familial and poetic, weaving together death, spirituality, women, and a sense of the shifting earth into one "doctrine of Non-linear Revelation."
Elegy
And I was equal to my longing: the mums blackening; sorrow a carboned figurine; the firmament steaming; your ashes interred in the boulder; the ugly birds crying dolor dolor dolor; the sky smoke-choked?what, then, would you have had be my register? As the beasts of the field rub their antlers off with ooh-itch pleasure; as the screen says You often open around this time; as the grapes blight: listen: sometimes we're the pilgrim, sometimes we're the site.
KERRI WEBSTER (Boise, ID) is the author of the poetry collections The Trailhead, We Do Not Eat Our Hearts Alone, and Grand & Arsenal, the latter of which won the Iowa Poetry Prize. The recipient of awards from the Whiting Foundation and the Poetry Society of America, she was a Visiting Writer-in-Residence at Washington University in St. Louis from 2006-2010. She currently teaches at Boise State University.
CONTENTS ? oh each poet's a/beautiful human girl who must die ? I ? Primrose, Orchid, Datura ? Seer Stone ? II ? Against Shame ? Relic Hall ? Visitation ? It is an Old Story but One That Can Still Be Told (Gilgamesh) ? And Made My Body an Instrument of the Reckoning ? The New Dispensation ? This Must Be What Happened (Gilgamesh) ? State of the Union ? The Dead Teach Me Grounding Techniques ? Split ? Oh My Darlings ? I Go and See a Man About Some Lapis ? III ? So Many Worlds, So Much to Do ? IV ? State of the Union ? Of Hutto ? Towards a Discipline of Joy ? The Garden as Partition Like the One in Every Annunciation ? And One Ge*ra*ni*um ? The Lapis Nuns and the Radium Girls Meet in the Hereafter ? Clorox ? Elegy ? Eyelets ? Acknowledgements ? Notes
"The visionary poetics of Lapis upend the notion of a shared, secular consensus, revealing death's capacity to transfigure; to render 'God-struck.' Like the sacred manuscripts labored-over by medieval nuns, Webster's language is richly illuminated."?Hannah LeClair, Jacket2