Description
- Kind: Perfectbound
- Pages: 78
- Language: English
- Date Published: May, 2015
- ISBN: 978-1-939929-21-1
Praise
If the creative task is to balance clarity and mystery, Samantha Reiser has done it. If the moral task is to weigh acts of creation against acts of destruction, Reiser knows: “Nothing is captured.”
“I fear my own thievery,” she wisely writes, as she pushes herself and us with raging agility in content and form, in this, her first collection of poems. —Estha Weiner
Excerpt
Johanna Nepula
Nothing left unpraised. Dishes dirtied, or maybe I recounted the wrong name for a place, saying the dust was German, when it had been her land all along. Once I broke the washing machine, and she sat me down to explain how the eucalyptus knew its belly was full while she tumbled the clothes by hand. It’s okay said three times, watching the knuckles push and pull in sanded water. I felt those knuckles, placing my hands over them, each a blackberry, softer than imagined, easy to puncture and slight when ripping bread. I wondered how they bathed her, the peculiarity of incisions that lined the midriff of fingers as cattle herded. From tailoring, from unhinged wire, one luminous: everything slips into the ground. The smallest one comes from a rock that pinched off and crushed her husband.
Author
Samantha Reiser was an English Concentrator at Harvard College, where she graduated in 2011, with honors. Her senior thesis was a finalist for the Yale Series of Younger Poets award, and several of the poems in her collection have been published in Lyre, Lyre and J. Journal among others. She continues to write poetry while she works as a coordinator with the US Program of Human Rights Watch. She will begin law school in fall of 2015.