70 pages
English language
Published July 21, 2013 by Graywolf Press.
Mary Szybist restlessly seeks out places where meaning might take on new color. One poem is presented as a diagrammed sentence. Another is an abecedarium made of lines of dialogue spoken by girls overheard while assembling a puzzle. Several poems arrive as a series of Annunciations, while others purport to give an update on Mary, who must finish the dishes before she will open herself to God. One poem appears on the page as spokes radiating from a wheel, or as a sunburst, or as the cycle around which all times and all tenses are alive in this moment. Szybist's formal innovations are matched by her musical lines, by her poetry's insistence on singing as a lure toward the unknowable. Inside these poems is a deep yearning -- for love, motherhood, the will to see things as they are and to speak.
This collection of poems is remarkable in both its diversity and its cohesion. Szybist shows us the biblical Mary in a variety of incarnations and various perspectives (as perceived by blades of grass, for instance, or by the angel). I posted a longer discussion of the book on my blog (Outside of a Cat). The short of it: this is a book well worth reading!
