To be led by the lantern of one’s sex. To be the bright fruit lit against the dimmest tree.To flick the knife quicker than real life and carve an initialed heart that spells a word you’ve never heard but have felt many rings deep. Its sound like an opiate. A flower. Its seeds emptied into the murkblack of a tea.Its taste even hounds slow down to savor. A word for gone mad on the salt shed from the moon to the mean-drunk sea. A word for your scent has left this place entirely.And he has taken your place in my dreaming.
Epithalamium
Stacy Gnall
Feature Date
- September 2, 2022
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Reprinted from Dogged.
Copyright © 2022 by the University of Massachusetts Press.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Stacy Gnall is the author of the poetry collections Dogged (winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry from The University of Massachusetts Press, 2022) and Heart First into the Forest (Alice James Books, 2011). A finalist for the Georgia Poetry Prize, her work has appeared in numerous journals, most recently Pleiades, Massachusetts Review, Bennington Review, and New American Writing. Gnall holds a Ph.D. in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Southern California, and is also a graduate of the University of Alabama’s MFA program in Creative Writing and Sarah Lawrence College. Originally from Cleveland, Ohio, she is currently Poet-in-Residence at the University of Detroit Mercy.
Amherst, Massachusetts
University of Massachusetts
"Gnall intertwines with, and submerges her voice in the voices of the animal so thoroughly that it is deliberately and wonderfully difficult to tease one from the other. An eloquent imagination informs every page of Dogged, in which the exploration of otherness is moving, enlarging, and surprising in a way very few books are.”
—Lynn Emanuel, author of The Nerve of It: Poems New and Selected
"Stacy Gnall realizes and then exercises the only authority upon which we can sanely rely: the authority of tenderness and, more specifically, of tenderness towards all life, all matter, and all moving substance. Not since Marianne Moore has an American poet given voice to the thrum and thrill of the creaturely, to the motives and meanings of creation in its poignant complexity, with such unguarded candor. With Dogged, Gnall shows herself to be an indispensable poet, and we can only be grateful."
—Donald Revell, author of White Campion and The English Boat
“Dogged rhymes its way toward our animal being, searching our world for humanity, empathy, and compassion. The experiences of dogs and cats, a swan, a fawn, birds, tigers, bulls, and wolves are intimate, deeply emotional, and compel us toward self-examination. At once dispirited and elegant, resigned and passionate, these poems, animals, and memories are rhyming creatures with ‘symmetry,’ though ours can be only partial, ‘inky half-symmetry.’”
—Arda Collins, author of It Is Daylight
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