The Fastening
The fifth book of poetry by a true poet's poet with a unique mastery of language and experimentation.
In Julie Doxsee’s The Fastening, the permanent imprints of love, childhood, death, and pleasure are elongated, handled delicately, celebrated, puzzled over, all while underpinned by hauntingly vicious origins. Landscapes in the book shift and jolt, melt into snowman slush or gash the flesh with matter-of-fact craters, thorns, rope burns, and rocks.
The poet wants to scrub the sharp peaks with steel wool but recognizes how millions of these violence-borne imprints have ganged up to keep her alive. In The Fastening, bodies are soft sketches that could detonate at the pop of a flashbulb, diffuse into a cloud of vapor, or escape into a small recess with just enough space to breathe.
Julie Doxsee is Canadian-American and the author of several books of poetry, including Undersleep, What Replaces Us When We Go, The Next Monsters, and Objects for a FogDeath, the latter three also published by Black Ocean. She is an associate professor of English at Harrisburg University.
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