Ship
maybe we find shipsRomantic because that word isboth a noun and a verbI once took a tripon a cruise with an Olympic-sized pool that floated flatabove the seathen my grandmotherand I took a ferry to the shoreto look at gardensher blood sugar dipped lowand she forgot what to callthe flowers or the citywe were in Osloshe kept askingare we doing the right thingnow her thoughts trailbehind me likea wakeI keep on crossingother nouns that are verbssink treat wishmaybe I wantan out-of-body experiencelike hersbeam blossom fathom lureeven when you and Ifall asleep holding handsI still drift away I flotsamI smell the stems the floating leavesa vase of my grandmother'seven though it sits emptyand you say it's okayto cut some thingsaway from their bodyI'm at the edgeof a pier before morningreeling and castingI thinkhow often has the vesselof this bodybeen filled up to its lip buoy slip
Feature Date
- March 1, 2023
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“Excerpt from Mag Gabbert’s SEX DEPRESSION ANIMALS, used by permission of Mad Creek Books, an imprint of The Ohio State University Press.”
Mag Gabbert is the author of SEX DEPRESSION ANIMALS (Mad Creek Books, 2023), which was selected by Kathy Fagan as the winner of the 2021 Charles B. Wheeler Prize in Poetry and includes the work published here; as well as the chapbook The Breakup, which was selected by Kaveh Akbar as the winner of the 2022 Baltic Writing Residencies Chapbook Award; and the chapbook Minml Poems (Cooper Dillon Books, 2020). She is the recipient of a 2021 Discovery Award from 92NY’s Unterberg Poetry Center and has received fellowships from the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, Idyllwild Arts, and Poetry at Round Top. Her work can be found in The American Poetry Review, The Paris Review Daily, Bat City Review, The Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere. Mag has an MFA from UC Riverside and a PhD from Texas Tech. She lives in Dallas, Texas and teaches at Southern Methodist University.
“SEX DEPRESSION ANIMALS startles with its immediate power. Smart, open, funny, sad, brilliantly wounded, ferociously kind, and ultimately hopeful, Mag Gabbert announces herself as a new force in American poetry.”
—Matthew Zapruder
“Mag Gabbert’s voice is a knockout. These poems transform sexual objectification into powerful, passionate erotic subjectivity, and we need that erotic joy. Dazzling.”
—Brenda Shaughnessy
“Gabbert’s poems leap off the page, fueled by nerve, passion, dazzling research, and one grief after another. Need drives her to question what it means to be a human, and a powerful poetic gift keeps spinning its answers into scorching music ‘like so many / sunbursts on the tongue.’ I love this book.”
—Timothy Donnelly
“The triumphs of SEX DEPRESSION ANIMALS are in language which renders desire, fury, pain, intimacy, and wonder as revolutionary spaces. Caged or uncaged, the poem is itself an animal, that ‘grief, without context,’ which brims with the wild beauty of defiance, of reconciliation, of agony that escapes, finally, into tenderness.”
—Chelsea Dingman
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