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Winner of the New Measure Poetry Prize
Selected by Peter Gizzi
Free Verse Editions, edited by Jon Thompson
What happens when a poet tries to filter the untranslatable from another language? The rush of unknowing, decoding the wind, the body becomes an antenna. Following behind Jack Spicer’s After Lorca and swinging its ovaries, Laura Wetherington’s second book uses the concept of translation to create original poems from the work of writers like Liliane Giraudon, Marie Etienne, Dominique Fourcade, and Jean-Marie Gleize. These poems run through a liminal linguistic space where meaning, mishearing, and dreams collide, sometimes midsentence, where they hinge into song: My man animal took shape in a shadow, / climbed over an obstacle, / became the void. Interstitial love letters to queer writers process a miscarriage, the most recent election, and queer puppy love. This is a book of yearning-for a foreign tongue, for a body growing inside the body, and for a form of communication that can capture feeling.
There is a constant textual drama in the address and voice of Laura Wetherington’s heady poems; a mirror staged. With monologues, letters, lyrics, and prose she performs a writing through to a new ground of sensation and thinking. Call it the present. The music is gorgeous and the sound is captivating. Parallel Resting Places is a wonderful book and a welcome addition to a tradition that troubles tradition. -Peter Gizzi
Laura Wetherington’s first book, A Map Predetermined and Chance, was selected by C.S. Giscombe for the National Poetry Series. She published a chapbook with Bateau Press, chosen by Arielle Greenberg for the Keel Hybrid Competition. Her work appears in Narrative, Michigan Quarterly Review, Colorado Review, FENCE, and VOLT, among others, and in three anthologies, The Sonnets: Translating and Rewriting Shakespeare (Nightboat Books), Choice Words: Writers on Abortion (Haymarket Books), and 60 Morning Talks (Ugly Duckling Presse). Laura’s essays and book reviews have been published in Kenyon Review, The Volta, Hyperallergic, Full Stop, Jacket2, and The University of Arizona Poetry Center’s 1508. A teacher in SNU Tahoe’s MFA Program and at Amsterdam University College, Laura’s also the poetry editor at Baobab Press.
