Whale in the Woods

Poetry. Inhabited by spirits, shadows, and ghosts harmonizing from the bleak and muddy bottoms of The Lake–the One and Only Lake–Blueberry Elizabeth Morningsnow’s debut collection of poems, WHALE IN THE WOODS, is a landscape of wild-hearted voices calling to us through passions so profound only Whitman has ever evoked them. Resolved, at first, to a ruined and dissolving world, these poems expand and reawaken the sounds of a mythmaking chorus. A lake is born, we learn, composed entirely of warm human eyes and a child / is born with eyes that only see when he closes him / A dark lake writes a poem / about lakes. It’s different than / any other poem about lakes. WHALE IN THE WOODS is brazen, sorrowful, ecstatic, and astonished, and Morningsnow a voice like no other in contemporary poetry. Winner of Rescue Press’s 2011 Black Box Poetry Prize, selected by Sabrina Orah Mark.

Here is a study of a world where God is a fossil, and the woods is a fossil, and the father is a fossil, and the lake is a fossil, and the sun is a fossil, and the poet is a fossil, and being alive is a fossil, and being dead is a fossil, and day is a fossil, and hello is a fossil, and goodbye is a fossil. Morningsnow digs so gorgeously. Her kindness is a gigantic mercy. She will trace you back.–Sabrina Orah Mark