In this stunning collection, elegy becomes an act of fierce attention. SUPERBLOOM chronicles the slow erasure of a sister - through the disorientation of dementia, the erosion of memory, and death - while unearthing the radiant, painful fragments of her life and the bond the speaker refuses to relinquish. Moving across decades and landscapes, from childhood street games in Queens to a bedside in California, these poems bear witness to what love endures and what it cannot save.
Rendered in crystalline lines and formally inventive shifts - from classical sonnets to clipped meditations and fractured dialogues - the poems are at once archival and ephemeral, gathering and letting go. They wrestle with the limitations of language and the permanence of loss, while still reaching, impossibly, for the shapes and the traces of what has been. "She's not the subject of the verb 'to be' / in any tense but past," one poem declares. And yet, like the moon jelly whose "body / holds the code for immortality," these poems pulse with the impossible ability to preserve what vanishes. SUPERBLOOM is not just a requiem; it is a resurrection stitched in language, a field of flowers blooming from ruin.
-Kimberly Grey, author, A Mother Is an Intellectual Thing (Persea Books)
Related Subjects
Poetry