When I Say the Bones I Mean the Bones by Amanda Hawkins
from Wandering Aengus Press
In taxidermy one encounters the word 'articulate, '
which means both to give shape to something and to express its systemic whole. The word means more or less the same thing in regards to language as well, though with language the system and shape are a part of a larger map of sounds and signs than that which is contained within the visible world. Amanda Hawkins articulates and is articulate. These poems reassemble bodies so that we may experience them as living or once living beings: the dead whale, the box of ash, the beloveds of one's life, intermingled in the dust of living and the decay of dying. Articulation is also a synonym for eloquence, and in these poems especially this is true: faithful renderings, vatic cries, devotional meditations: a landscape, a seascape and an inscape intricately involved in each others' symmetries. A monumental debut.
—D.A. Powell, author of Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys and Chronic
