Waterwork

Poetry. In five stunning sequences, Sarah Riggs has created a poetics of elastic migrations that imagines the world as clusters, skeins, and motions whose innate peril is miraculously saved in hte act of naming: ‘each name for a thing seems intent to curl from its shelled meaning.’ Places, histories, persons, myth and object, intimacy and incident, are precision shorelines of simultaneous apprehension and erasure. In this subtle and luminous first book, Sarah Riggs has engaged our most fundamental quandaries in a poetry that announces, in Stevens’ phrase, ‘a new knowledge of reality.’–Ann Lauterbach. [Riggs] turns her acute eye to contemporary culture as well as natural history and her ear to the subtle balances of rhythm and assonance. The result is a beautiful attention that illuminates nuance, making the everyday world more detailed and thus more grand–Cole Swensen.