“Each open flower is an overthrow. Every instance of
birdsong decries the cruel suicides. In Joanna Rawson’s Unrest, nothing less than the entire world is at risk—risk of
catastrophe, risk of both hellish and heavenly transformations. With visionary
ardor, with devotional precision, Rawson is writing poetry addressed to our
deepest concerns.”
THE SECOND COLLECTION BY THE AWARD-WINNING POET JOANNA RAWSON "WHOSE INTENSE LANGUAGE RECALLS THE HOTHOUSE PROSE OF CORMAC MCCARTHY" (KIRKUS)
The sky
threatens to answer a prayer but then won’t.
It is
not exactly our own minds we go out of.
—from
“The Insurgency”
A man’s sister sews him into a bus seat. Stowaway
immigrants suffocate in a crowded boxcar. The first female suicide bomber
passes through a checkpoint. Joanna Rawson’s Unrest shows the fervent, if not desperate, side of humanity
pressed to the limits. With a resonant lyricism and profound beauty, these
poems are restless meditations on American life, political borders,
lawlessness, parenthood, and the spaces where the natural world and human
turmoil come into conflict. Here is the voice of the poet at one moment in
contemplation and at the next in emotional outcry, stuttering into song.
“Joanna Rawson’s poems tend toward the immediate, her shattered
narratives describing a landscape that is swollen and overripe, ready to burst.
These are violent poems, not in the sense of voyeurism or titillation, but in
terms of a society on the brink of coming apart: the detonation of the
pastoral, erotic affairs heading for annihilation, transcendence laced with
despair and resignation.
