The Logan Notebooks by Rebecca Lindenberg
(Center for Literary Publishing, 2014)

reviewed by Stefanie Wortman

In The Logan Notebooks, Rebecca Lindenberg offers poems of careful observation, colored by the particular beauties and idiosyncrasies of the town in Utah where the book is set. This is an elemental poetry, characterized in part by multiple attempts to address subjects like “Birds” and “Trees” and “Mountains.” Lindenberg attends to what is strange about the “usual stuff,” as in “Things Found in a Local Grocery Store”: “pink tomatoes, bagged salad darkening in the corners, pale gelatinous salmon or flaccid little gray shrimp.” Her poems also approach the sublime as in “On a Visit to Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels,” in which the winter solstice offers a sight “Worth the pain in your hand-joints you can only feel in this kind of cold.” In either case, the poems are sensitive to beauty wherever it might be found.

The notebook structure of the collection gives rise to a tension between the forward-movement of narrative—centrally, the story of a relationship growing, failing, and ending—and the constancy of elements like clouds and wind, which Lindenberg names in many varieties, some factual and some imaginative. The book moves from “September” through “A December Wedding” and “One Week in April” to “The End of August.” The cycle of the year and the seasons partakes of both movement and stasis, joining the forward momentum of time with the constants of nature.

In their attention to both the ordinary and the extraordinary, these poems display a classifying impulse, and they often take the form of lists. Lindenberg’s catalogs have a force different from the accumulative poetry that comes out of Whitman. His poems, and others inspired by them, take a view of the world that Elizabeth Bishop might have characterized as everything connected by “‘and’ and ‘and’.” By contrast, Lindenberg’s lists often feel like they’re implicitly connected by “or” and “or.” She seems to search for the best or most representative member of a category. In these prose poems, often modeled on work from the 17th century Japanese text The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon, each item in the list comprises a distinct paragraph, a technique that contributes to the feeling that their speaker is holding up and carefully considering each possibility.

Even as she makes these lists, Lindenberg acknowledges that the project of cataloging contains the seeds of its own failure. The entirety of the poem “Impossible Things” is the admission, “It is impossible to be comprehensive.” She also wonders about the judgment implied in putting things into categories. In “Beautiful Things,” she begins with confidence that a certain tree is beautiful, but stumbles when she tries to explain why:

    The Tree of Life in our backyard is beautiful because it holds up a swing. No,
    because it conceals the pheasants. No, because it drops its leaves in the creek. No,          
    because you love it. No, because everyone loves it. No, because its origins are a
    mystery. No, because it is ours.

She wants to find some justification for including the tree in the list, but ends back at simple assertion: “No, it is not beautiful? O, it is beautiful. It is beautiful.” As she tries to pin down her criteria, Lindenberg also explores the correctness and effectiveness of language itself. These questions are most immediately apparent in “Different Ways of Speaking”: “Our neighbor across the cul-de-sac says something about gays in the military. Only he does not say ‘gays.’ / Our neighbor says something about alcoholism in the Native American community. Only he does not say ‘alcoholism’ or ‘Native American.’” In a book that makes many things parallel, Lindenberg also has to question whether language should be sorted into better and worse, acceptable and unacceptable, as she corrects the neighbor’s discriminatory speech. She holds out the hope that by writing a poem she can get beyond misunderstanding and miscommunication: “Poetry is nobody’s / native language. Or the only one.”

The Logan Notebooks is also a book about place—or about the idea of a place. What makes Logan a part of the West? What makes the West the West? Among Lindenberg’s quiet observations, there is an undercurrent of conflict and violence, and it is telling that her first attempt to define the West looks back to the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake: “That was the first time I felt the strange elation of utter rupture, when something happens that is so scary, it is too much to feel.” In one of the poems titled “Mountains,” the landscape rings with gunshot, and though it is likely just some kids shooting for sport

    […] it’s still the sound of a heavy-haunched creature being put down. Or it’s the sound of a
    great rural indignation. Or of some dread teenager’s heart backfiring. Or a hundred
    schoolchildren turning to see what clicked open the door.

Lindenberg’s is not a poetry of epiphany or clever wordplay. This is not to say there aren’t clever moments—one of her “Things that Lose by Being Written About” is “Being a woman, which is fairly easy as long as no one’s around.” She is just not particularly interested in flash. Instead, she aims to look deeply into what is most familiar. As she writes in another of the variations on “Mountains,” “[…] all I want is to see the same landscape a thousand times and never repeat myself.”

The Stuntman by Brian Laidlaw
(Milkweed Editions, 2014)

reviewed by Josh Cook

Stuntmen are surrogates. They willingly put themselves in harm’s way, give a glossy sheen to danger, stage art in the name of preserving “the pretty.” Brian Laidlaw, the yarn-spinning musician and lyric poet, takes a scalpel to the heart of the stuntman in his first full-length collection. Does the stuntman elevate the art? Or is he an underpaid instrument? Where does real creation happen? In the poet or the poem? The song or the singer? The sense or the sound? The book begs these questions but also interrogates lost time, individual responsibility, communal apocalypse, the role of art, the absurdity of art business, and the precariousness of the body/shell of things. These strains manifest in mysterious missives, rants, fragments, and confessions.

The speakers in The Stuntman are restless souls full of folk wisdom. They yearn for home, casting about genuine modes of expression. “THE EARTH BROKE OPEN BECAUSE WE BROKE IT OPEN,” the speaker of “Telegram,” the book’s opening poem, says. Ingenuity comes at a cost, and humans, though agents of destruction, are also agents capable of manifold change. Even beauty is susceptible to violence, as in “Notes for a Song Called ‘All it Takes’” where “The day doesn’t just break, it outright shatters.”

The first section teaches the reader how to read the collection. Repeated images of home abound, and a remarkable associative logic rides on jaunty rhythms and wordplay. The speaker of “Upstate Mother’s Refrain” comprises a list, repeating “I know,” but then her voice is shot through with italicized commentary.  She says:

    I know the tart iron water is reaming the well-poles
    I know freshwater sharks
    I know haters & orphans
    I know patriot atheists […]

Where are we, exactly? Some distant land, perhaps. In section two, we get references to the Washburn A Flour Mill in Minneapolis, torn-down cities, Trotskyites, outer space, the Cold War, and cannibals. The collection’s eight “Terrarium Letters” and five “Telegrams” also throw the poems into dislocation. Is the sender from a far-off place? Or are we? Either way, they conjure a sense of lost home, alienation, and a vacant space between that which is and that which is desired. “Terrarium Letter #2,” a twangy ramble, strains toward the connectivity and complexity of objects:

    the record needle has dust, is an eyelet, a stinger, isn’t stingy, the coronets on the
    record are dumber than ever, the daughter falls in love with her own hands […]

The swerves in action and the clever line breaks jolt you into and out of frenetic narratives, the effect somewhere between be-bop and ballad. “Narcissus the Debutante” begins:

    newcomer grows in, killing familiarity
    the wealthy scramble to incorporate

    he attends their dinners
    like demons they need new bodies.
Laidlaw’s not giving anything away explicitly, though. We’re left to guess where we are located, and it often turns out to be a cold, mythic mystery landscape where “here were trappers,” where the “Voyeurs Cum Voyageurs” collectively assert, “we lowdown our hearts in the tundra / we lowdown the spades.”  “A List of Scenarios” unravels in non sequiturs, what could be a stoner’s brainstorm for song-titles, including, “a bird with a broken wing” and “the randomizer stalks the spreadsheet.” The inclusion of objects like “spreadsheets” destabilizes the landscape, something Laidlaw—the Stuntman—is adept at. Hold on to your reins, cowboys, Laidlaw seems to say, don’t get too comfortable. If you do, you might miss something ingenious, like this from “The Cartographer Cries into His Knapsack”:

             I want to hear my elegy for everywhere, over the radio in the off-road
    limousine, wrenching up to a place I have no business, a sing-along

               
                        to myself weeping with joy.

Laidlaw is aware of his tricks, thus a constant reckoning of the commercialization of art. “Terrarium Letter #5” begins, “So-and-so is the next So-and-so, I wonder if that’s enough or if I care at all […]” Here, Laidlaw succeeds at parsing the paradoxes that lie between making art and “making it.”

It helps to know that Laidlaw is working from, riffing off of, and deconstructing the myth of Narcissus and Echo, the central image, of course, being Narcissus peering down into his own image.  It’s also based on Bob Dylan’s relationship with Echo Helstrom, his high school girlfriend and “The Girl from the North Country.” Dylan’s cryptic references to Echo throughout his career—at different times referring to her as Hazel, Becky Thatcher, and the girl who looked like Brigitte Bardot—baffled critics, and no one really knows how important she is or was to Dylan. In many ways, Laidlaw’s “Stuntman” pivots with the same reluctant frenzy of Dylan’s amorphous career—that is, seamlessly, and not without blithe provocation. The book also comes with a companion album for download. The songs are easy, Sunday-afternoon tunes, and Laidlaw’s voice pours like rich molasses. He’s less confrontational in his songs, freer, more narrative. Perhaps this is the echo, the stuntman’s double, the safer, prettier side. He saves danger for his page, and we’re all the better for it.

Blue Patina by Nancy Takacs
(Blue Begonia Press, 2015)

reviewed by Kate Kingston

The poems in Blue Patina weave through varied subject matter, some relating to childhood, others to wilderness, and still others to the concept of worry. Each of the four sections has its unique theme, but the unifying threads are in Nancy Takacs’ attention to voice and imagery, her relationship to the natural world, and her intuitive perception.

In the opening section, “The Voices,” Takacs journeys back through her childhood in the cityscape of Bayonne, NJ. Her opening poem of the same title begins with a lyrical description of voice which serves as a springboard for the poems that follow:

    My bee and blossom voice
    hums in my wrist each morning, flies out
    over the field, bumbles through dust
    in the April wind, flies low to the apple trees
    to lose myself whole in each center.

Takacs immediately focuses on the act of writing, the physical activity of the wrist, the ability to go beyond the self, drawing on nature and its images, to become lost in the centering—an intuition that gyrates with wisdom. This poem serves as an introduction to the collection as a whole. The determination and grit that drives these poems is expressed further in the poem:

    The bicycle voice
    is a wise voice, tells me
    to keep moving, get back on
    and turn my thin beige tires

This first section reaches back to a time of I Love Lucy, garter belts, and childhood secrets, defined by Takacs in her poem “Hurt” as a time when “writing was penmanship, / and we were in love with letters / as if they were tears, and we were / the ones who had cried them.” These poems lend a renewed perspective to growing up—Sunday Mass followed by donuts from the deli, a stolen kiss, and intimate relationships that form family—the brother’s distance, the father and his buddies at Campbell’s Tavern, and the mother’s voice of prayers and songs. From the poem, “Sunday, My Brother,” we hear an example of Takacs’ haunting voice:

    No one knew back then
    what you and I know now:
    personality disorders, AA.
    No one thought anyone
    was crazy or needy.
    We just expected our neighbor
    to lay all night smashed,
    bloody, in the alleyway.
    Even our own father
    coming home from the tavern,
    speaking nonsense, might
    have a gash or two.

Her subject matter is unflinching and grasps the core of what it is to be human, to transcend our surroundings and make sense of the world we inhabit.

The poems in the section “Utah Map” use nature as a catalyst for rediscovery, opening into a life much different than her childhood in New Jersey. From her experience as a Wilderness Studies Guide, landscapes surface—mountains, deserts, rivers, and slick rock. Seamless language appears to grow effortlessly from the sandy soil, rugged canyons, and juniper-laden ridges where “the exotic is nature.” Takacs luxuriates in images of flora, fauna, and weather that compose wilderness and shares this adventure of spirit in her “jeep / clawing its way over slick rock.” She writes of avalanches and quicksand, arches and petroglyphs, flash floods and crabapples in her desert yard. Her sensitivity to inner landscape likewise flourishes as in the poem “Escalante” where she invites the reader to discover “ghost-shaped / petroglyphs in the dark blue patina.”

Takacs is also a water color artist, and her intimate knowledge of hues, tones and textures is evident in her images of desert landscape infused with light as in the poem “Balance Rock, October”:

    We never tell where we jeep for lunch
    between nearby canyon walls whose dark
    patina sheens to indigo, sapphire, a swarm of blues;
    petroglyphs float under alcoves
    near Swasey’s Leap; silent orange vistas
    accordion at The Wedge. 

As if her notebook were a canvas, she sketches images through idiolect and responds to other artists’ paintings as well, infusing the page with a rich verbal palette. Her ekphrastic response to a painting by David Dornan in the poem “‘Process’ at the Balance Rock Café” highlights her ability to process color and texture through language:

    Now I know I need the sudden turquoise car
    inside the lemon-yellow house,
    lavender anemones over corrugated
    ribs, the tin ribs, the bare ribs,
    a whiteness more like a rose-cream,
    orange a true orange into fluorescent-orange into red,
    lipped over undercoats of lime, violet, battleship;  

In the section entitled “The Worrier,” her voice takes on the previously promised maturity of wisdom from the “bicycle voice.” Each poem in this section is structured as a dialogue between two inner voices that create a philosophical template based on our human capacity for worry. The question/answer format revolves around fear, relationships, and nature’s fragility. The two voices remain true to themselves, never bordering on the sentimental, never hesitating, but rather speaking with a clarity based on experience. The juxtapositions parallel the turmoil of mid-life, but they also resonate with an inner intuition that dictates the wildly juxtaposed answers as in the “Worrier” poem subtitled “the body.”

    What are the crimes of the lake?

    Silence.
    Not giving up the dead.
    Grief.

    And what does the lake heal?

    Elbows of crawdads,
    splintered oak,
    edges of washed glass,
    the plan of silver.

    What does that silver do?

    It allows the body
    to surface.  

The litany here is not only dependent on the words but also on white space. Concrete and abstract meld to create a resonance rooted in the sparse toughness of language. Her word choice, “Not giving up the dead,” ignites the concept of fear and diffuses later in the “plan of silver” that “allows the body /  to surface,” leaving an intuitive truth growing like wisdom in the rib cage. Through sparse language, white space, and dialogue, Takacs scaffolds an emotional and intellectual core in each of these “Worrier” poems.

Thematically, childhood poems, wilderness poems, and “Worrier” poems lead us to the fourth section, “Still,” with its attention to the all-encompassing fragility of nature reflected in the fragility of the self. Takacs’ images and their appeal to the senses keep us grounded while her intuitive grasp of what is beyond the mundane culminates in this last section. Here we discover meditative, quiet poems that subtly resonate back through the manuscript. The poems in this final section are embedded in a sense of reflection that acknowledges tension as portrayed in the poem “Yoga Class”:

    I like it when the moments
    fall gently into one another,
    end up on some island
    with no human footprints
    and many bear. 

Takacs’ poems leap from unexpected places, yet they always land in the still pond of the self that sends ripples, not unlike a stone tossed into still water. Takacs’ poems migrate out from the center through imagery, and discover, then embrace, the shifting self. 

The Sound of Sugar....Laura Stott

INTO THE BLUE

At the edge of a boat dock
the blue nudes look far down a ladder—
 
to where it hits surface glass.
They can see rungs barely

waver as their blue heads peer
over. Their own eyes

and the stars reflect in dark tide.
It seems they will be climbing

down into sky, one
blue nude after another.

It couldn’t feel anymore night.
Seals swim in their black

milky way. Sky ripples
with the color glaciers create.

One moon bathed, barnacled
rung at a time, the blue nudes

disappear, past mussels
in their blue shells,

kelp tangled in mid-air.
One nude stops at the rim

before arranging herself
over the side—torso twists,

as hands cling. She looks back.
It is this leaving that’s beginning.

Her hair blows in the wind.


ABOUT THE POET:

Laura Stott received her MFA from Eastern Washington University and she teaches writing at Weber State University. Her poems have appeared in various publications including Hayden’s Ferry Review, Bellingham Review, Sugar House Review, and are forthcoming in Crate.

ABOUT THE SOUND OF SUGAR:

We’ve loved reading the work that we’ve published (clearly), so now we want an opportunity to better hear our contributors. We will feature an audio recording of a poem from one of our seven issues, read by the poet and updated every couple of weeks. This an open invitation to all contributors from any of our issues, we were delighted to print your work, now we’re eager to hear it.  

The Sound of Sugar....Matthew Landrum

BLUE LAWS

Sarah’s hair freezes in the winter wind as we walk down
the hill to the corner store forgetting blue strictures

that say you can’t buy alcohol on Sundays
before noon. See—

sometimes it’s not conscience that keeps us
from falling. Forgetfulness

and luck too have a share
in our salvation. This morning leaves us

high and dry. We kill half an hour, observe the icicles
hanging from the spire of St. Mary’s,

wander the neighborhood, past the alleyway
where, years ago, I knelt and prayed for God

to end me. My vomit wouldn’t freeze,
even though it was ten below. And I walked out

leaving that afterbirth of a new life
steaming on the pavement and thought I was finished

with all that forever. But we live on
the edge of a precipice, always one step away

from ourselves. Sarah’s pixie hair freezes
in December, still wet with showering. And when we return

home and sit with six packs by the fire,
it will steam.


ABOUT THE POET:

Matthew Landrum teaches Latin and literature in Ann Arbor. His poems have recently appeared in The Emerson Review and Cold Mountain Review.

ABOUT THE SOUND OF SUGAR:

We’ve loved reading the work that we’ve published (clearly), so now we want an opportunity to better hear our contributors. We will feature an audio recording of a poem from one of our seven issues, read by the poet and updated every couple of weeks. This an open invitation to all contributors from any of our issues, we were delighted to print your work, now we’re eager to hear it. 

The Sound of Sugar....Kristen Clanton

METRONOME

The peacock devours his plume absently
as the mermaid falters posture among sinking swells—

black lines that separate air from cloud from bird,
tree from leaf from root, tiny pictures painted black.
Hung in strict rows for me to chart your path,
I follow you foolishly to the sea.

Closer, I can feel the gloom’s yawning breath.
Closer and the dawn’s golden nod escapes the wire.

Compass misplaced and panic where sleep should be.


ABOUT THE POET:

Kristen Clanton is an adventurer, defenseless only to gravity and the subconscious. She graduated from the University of Nebraska, earning an MFA in poetry. Her poetry and short fiction have been published by Bicycle Review, The Birds We Piled Loosely, Burlesque Press, MadHat Drive-By Book Reviews, MadHat Lit, Midnight Circus, The Outrider Review, Ragazine, Quilt, and Sugar House Review. She has work forthcoming in The Mangrove Review and Otto Magazine. You can see to all that here: http://www.kristenclanton.com and contact her here: kristen.clanton@gmail.com

ABOUT THE SOUND OF SUGAR:

We’ve loved reading the work that we’ve published (clearly), so now we want an opportunity to better hear our contributors. We will feature an audio recording of a poem from one of our seven issues, read by the poet and updated every couple of weeks. This an open invitation to all contributors from any of our issues, we were delighted to print your work, now we’re eager to hear it. 

Sediment & Veil by Kirsten Jorgenson
(Horse Less Press, 2014)

reviewed by Michael McLane

“No one in Utah ever died from radiation poisoning; it isn’t on the form.” This pithy and chilling remark, usually attributed to R. Billings Brown, a professor at the University of Utah medical school, cuts to core of why the legacy of nuclear tests remains the elephant in the room throughout the Southwest, and Utah in particular. It also suggests the reason that Kirsten Jorgenson’s first collection, Sediment & Veil, is such a welcome addition to the poetry world and to Western literature at large. Though many poets have contributed a poem or two on the subject, Jorgenson’s is the first poetry collection since Emma Lou Thayne’s 1983 How Much for the Earth to approach the subject with such depth and care.

These poems grapple with the acute disruption that nuclear testing—and its attendant skyrocketing rates of leukemias, thyroid cancers, female reproductive cancers, sterility, and congenital malformations—caused for thousands of families, including the poet’s, throughout Utah and Nevada, an area declared “a region of sacrifice” by both government and military officials owing largely to its low population densities and a widespread perception of the Great Basin as a wasteland. It was safer to risk clouds of fallout landing on small communities like Ely and St. George than for them to roll through large populations in Las Vegas and Los Angeles. Likewise, the largely-Mormon population in the area, still eager to be perceived as patriots after a century of distrust from the nation at large, were rightly believed to be less likely to complain or to seek litigation or remuneration. These conflicting perceptions and legacies of landscape and faith come to bear heavily on Jorgenson’s poems and illustrate that the term Downwinders is not to be used in the past tense, but is instead an ongoing struggle, one that bears itself out in in the ephemeral world of memory as well and the much more tangible world of medicine.

From the opening page of Sediment & Veil, it is clear that the body, and many bodies, are the primary setting(s) for these poems, but the body it is not a boundary, a place clearly delineated; rather, it is a membrane which the joy and tragedy of memory transgresses perpetually and which unwittingly welcomes the legacy of the Nevada Test Site and the nuclear West:
  
    every one

    is remembering

    a single line

    a mouthful

    say I border

    my body

    filmy

    ghost
 
Ghosts abound in this text, as do skeletons, bones, and souls; the corporeal and spiritual infrastructure of the individual are at stake throughout it pages. As the book’s title implies, there is a direct correlation between what settles to the ground and the losses felt upon that land.

On a half dozen or so occasions in the book, images accompany or even overlap the poems. In one instance, “a grid representing abnormal macular degeneration” in which one corner of the grid sways and bends, illustrates a patient’s blind spot. Overlapping the grid is the passage “memory is light / through flesh / honeybee / ghost / incinerator / a language / in bones / cells / a promised land.” Jorgenson packs an unbelievable amount of history and conflict into that combination of sixteen words and one image. It is one such moment in the book where the poignancy of loss, the governmental blind spot toward a population, the irony of the poisoning of a wide swatch of the Mormon Zion (represented by both the “honeybee” and “promised land,”) and the tragic connotations of light in this context, collide head-on in a succinct-but-chilling moment. Elsewhere, Jorgenson has essentially dissected what she labels a “contour map of a ‘Turf’ detonation in Area 10 of the Nevada Test Site,” placing single sections or layers from the map on top of, or adjacent to her text. Removed from their full context, these images are haunting, appearing as ultrasounds or small piles of dust strewn across the page, the latter creating a particularly devastating effect when accompanied by passages such as “written into darkness / a curtain / veil / to be pulled through or not.” Perhaps more importantly, the pieces of map are a reminder that when such tragedies are visited upon a landscape, neither maps nor the land itself can be trusted going forward.

Of the various themes addressed in her poems, the notion of faith pitted against citizenship is one of the most complex and overlooked aspects of Utah’s nuclear legacy. Despite overwhelming evidence that they were deliberately overlooked and lied to, there is an ongoing conflict between victims and descendants who are furious and seeking both admission of guilt and recompense from the federal government and those who continue to want to believe that their family members, farms, and animals died for the greater good and for a patriotic cause. Though Jorgenson offers no judgement or resolution of such conflict, it is key to her interaction with others throughout the poems, most poignantly in the writing of “This is the Place” on a makeshift sign for a family reunion (a clear gesture to the words ascribed to Brigham Young upon his entrance to the Salt Lake Valley) and the poem’s final line, “Your hair has ash in it,” a reference to the fact that many Downwinders at first perceived falling radioactive ash from tests to be freak snowstorms.
                                   
As much as it is an exploration of historical events, Sediment & Veil is also a poignant exploration of the function and dysfunction of memory of the period preceding, and immediately following, great personal loss. While the specifics of this loss are never overtly revealed, which often allows such scenes a timeless quality, it remains an axis on which the book turns and reprises. The passage quoted in full earlier in this review reappears on several occasions, its eight lines disintegrated and recombinant. Similarly, other media that appear in the poems, like the test site map presented in piecemeal, begin to undo themselves. A photograph in one poem offers a stark example of this tendency when Jorgenson writes:
  
    call you ghost
                                                                              you moved away
             you left a smudge on the film
                                                        no face to identify your body
no body but spilled and congealed milk

Like memory, the body is a desolate setting here, whether it be the men a relative describes finding in Dachau, “so thin they were hanging by their genitals from piano wire,” or the “evening ghosts[…] / collapsing against horizon / the 6,000 head of sheep / blood atonement.” Such moments are reflected in the increasing expanse of the poem’s geography, as the southern portion of the Great Basin expands to include the Great Salt Lake and the salt flats of Utah’s west desert, places ostensibly barren but playing host to ecosystems as fragile as a body under attack from cancer. It is a psychic landscape as well, as references to the 1960s cult classic Carnival of Souls implies. Shot in and around the Great Salt Lake, including the former lakeside dance hall of Saltair, the film, like the book, is an exploration of attempting to make home in a place that poses a tangible threat. But where Mary Henry’s character is largely haunted by ghosts of the mind, the ghosts of the land itself play an equal counterpoint in Jorgenson’s poems.

Sixty-plus years on, the legacy of nuclear testing continues to be shaped simultaneously by ongoing tragedies for those families exposed to its byproducts and by an increasing desire from Downwinders, and the nation at large, for a more complex understanding of the events surrounding the tests. The numbers of scholarly studies and oral histories are increasing, giving voice to a group that achieved a day of remembrance only two years ago. Likewise, Jorgenson’s unflinching glimpse into ground zero’s “glass desert” provides a crucial lyric and fragmentary component to such work. Difficult history gains emotional and intellectual depth in the hands of a skilled poet. This is precisely what Sediment & Veil offers, to devastating effect. And yet, in spite of the sacrifices made, the steadfastness of the people these poems document shines through from time to time, as in the
  
    two years of food in the pantry

    enough to walk

    through the burning world

    counting blessings

    locust and gull

    counting blessings

    locust and gull