Like the Appalachian mountain setting from which GLOSS arises, the language in this collection is in flux, full of paradox and thresholds, each word and line a peak or a range. The poems are mined from the ruptured and fragmented rock and dirt of the colloquial, creating a kind of “landguage” or “langscape.” Indeed, the poems (mis)behave like little ecosystems, in which wordplay, rhyme, and enjambment simultaneously make and break sense, join and repel—evoking the tensions between progress and resistance. Embedded among the strata of GLOSS is loss: many poems respond to mountaintop removal coal mining, which is literally flattening the rich complexity of the Appalachian landscape and culture. As the poems give voice to the mountaintop, they consider the delicate relationship between humans and nature, lover and beloved, as well as the natural complexity of communication and utterance, the struggle to say the unsayable. 

 

Praised by the judges for its remarkable sense of sound, syntax, and meaning, GLOSS continues to surprise on subsequent readings.  The poet is engaged, playful, and curious, and so therefore is the reader. 

 

Ida Stewart is a doctoral student in creative writing at the University of Georgia.  This is her first book.

 

GLOSS will be released in September 2011.