Risk
Risk
by Rusty Morrison
Paperback / 62p. / Poetry
ISBN 978-1939568-76-2
From the co-publisher of acclaimed poetry press Omnidawn, Risk engages directly with limitations, both those that structure the literal form of the poems and literary form and those that are both unavoidable and self-inflicted.
In Risk, award-winning poet Rusty Morrison embraces the art of constraint, weaving her verse within the tight embrace of seven-syllable segments, punctuated by deliberate pauses. Inspired by the philosophical insights of Hélène Cixous, who posits that “the border is both a barrier and a gateway,” Morrison navigates the intricate dance of boundaries. Through her carefully framed verse, she seeks not only to understand the limits that define us but to challenge and transcend them. Risk is a daring journey, inviting us to confront what lies beyond the borders of comfort and convention.
“Her supple intelligence and disarming vision models for us ways to attend to experience in its ever-deepening complexity, yielding congeries of meaning and feeling. Durable revelation after durable revelation are tossed, like pebbles, into the poems’ currents. These lyrics hold life’s limitless unknowability, and the depth of what remains hidden to us, in plain view. Morrison’s means for coaxing forth astonishments is stunning.”
“Most of the breath-stopping poems in Risk are defined by strong lineal caesuras—as though the poems were torn open to show ‘the deaths you carry within.’ And yet, the dominant theme of Risk is bonding—the bonding of a couple, and the bonding that language might engender. Morrison’s poems have always struck me with their seriousness, with their aversion to irony, and with their ecstatic merging of abstraction and particularity. Risk reminds us of the mutability of identity and its collaborative constructs in our interactions with others and with the world itself.”
“Equal parts postmodern mysticism and documentarian witnessing, this book urges the reader to ‘write into abandonment,’ and ‘See a world of new lives form,’ born of refined poetic sensibility”
