Beskrivelse
Ethan Paquin writes "Language is notorious." In his latest collection, language is as lush and textured as the mountains and oceans that are his subjects, and familiar natural landmarks are representational of memory so that mind and body become layers in this vast loam. Both political and emotional, with one foot planted firmly in the pastoral tradition and one testing the waters of a neo neo-Romanticism, this book's speaker leads us on a trail of memories where past, future, and present self-hood are conflated beyond recognition. Only through knowledge of the rough earth will he come to know the self: "carry me like a reed-basket of water over the pinions of landscapes / blasted by heat and then i will know where i belong."
Chapter
Tarpaulin I call my home this stormy world.
Windswept tarn on the high ridge my ocean
always gray no landfall in sight earth's dropped
off. How do we rebuild—before rains arrive,
after starry romance is clouded over. Stray
hair, eight aeons ago you held onto me. My
shoulder. I saved you in a secret box, if only
to remember I need forget you at all costs.
Ethan Paquin graduated from Plymouth State College with a BA in English-Writing, and received his MFA in Poetry from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is the author of five books of poems: CLOUD VS. CLOUD (Ahsahta Press, 2013), My Thieves (Salt Publishing, 2007), THE VIOLENCE (Ahsahta Press, 2005), ACCUMULUS (Salt Publishing, 2003), and The Makeshift (Stride Publications, 2002). These have been reviewed in publications including The London Times Literary Supplement, Publishers Weekly, Poetry Review (London), New Review of Literature, and PN Review (London). His creative writing and criticism/commentary have appeared in publications including The Colorado Review, Boston Review, NEW AMERICAN WRITING, Quarterly West, Verse, Esquire, The Wall Street Journal, Canadian Review of Books, and Meanjin (Australia). Paquin is the founding editor of the longstanding online literary journal Slope and is co-founder and director of the nonprofit small poetry press Slope Editions. He lives and teaches in his native New Hampshire.
