Apostrophe
Ocean, every so often, a kitchen tile or child's toyrises from you, years after the hurricane's passed.This time, the disaster was somewhere else.The disaster was always somewhere else, until it wasn't.Punctuation of the morning after: comma betweenred sky and sailors' warning, white space where a storm cloud lowers.Where the bay breaks away, the sentence ends: a waningcrescent of peninsula, barely visiblebut for the broken buildings, the ambulance lights.Ocean, even now, even shaken, you hold the memoryof words, of worlds that failed slowly, then all at once.A flotilla of gulls falls onto you, mourners draped in slate.
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- February 15, 2024
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“Apostrophe” from Given: by Liza Katz Duncan.
Published by Autumn House on April 02, 2023.
Copyright © 2024 by Liza Katz Duncan.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Liza Katz Duncan is the author of Given (Autumn House Press, 2023), which received the Autumn House Press Rising Writer Award and the Laurel Prize for Best International First Collection (UK). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in AGNI, About Place, the Kenyon Review, Poem-a-Day, Poetry, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. Liza grew up in New Jersey and holds an MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson College. She teaches English as a Second Language in New Jersey public schools.
Liza Katz Duncan’s debut collection, Given, winner of the Autumn House Rising Writer Prize, is both a poignant elegy and a sustained meditation integrating reflections on aesthetic perception and the complex interdependence between nature and psyche with deepening mourning of tragedies personal and collective.
—North of Oxford
Liza Katz Duncan’s Given testifies to the luminous terror of creation: “the sky makes and remakes.” Then: “I had to write myself back into this place, if only to watch it fall apart.” There is so much here being made and unmade: personal griefs decimated by ecology, ecologies decimated by personal loss. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a poet do what Liza Katz Duncan does here, testifying to loss and endurance this way, in such a radiant braid.
—Kaveh Akbar, author of Pilgrim Bell
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