Pilgrimly

Free Verse Editions, edited by Jon Thompson | "These are luminous, complicated poems. Crystalline. Turn them one way, they are full of blackberry brambles, ecotonalities, the banks where water laps with land. Another way and they are dusts and yet whale songs too. Yet another, women and words. They are written mainly in sentences. They are quiet and they enthrall." -JULIANA SPAHR, one of the authors of Army of Lovers | "Attentive to telling detail. The metallic bloom of bright silences. Hieratic: Instructions for a vigil. Augury: We could ruminate, luxuriate, and divinate in the language of these exquisite poems. They give the light with their own eyes. There is gold on their tongues. Their words marry, or refer. Lure or long. In the alchemical brilliance of Siobhán Scarry's stunning debut collection, we walk the page as if the earth, feeling each word a footstep, and each footstep marking our PILGRIMLY progress. How surely the poems move us to their spacious pilgrimage. Offer proof of Presence. Fiery. Cerebrally." -CYNTHIA HOGUE, author of Or Consequence and Flux | "PILGRIMLY exposes our hidden attachments to things and places, seasons and weather. Even our most sentimental passions turn startling and strange when rendered by Scarry's exacting syntax, her crisp images also gifting them with photographic accuracy. 'A yellow swing and a root cellar with jars,' she writes, 'Not everything had a language.' This lack of language makes relations to the world of objects both comforting and perplexing, home and unheimlich, and what I love about this book is how profoundly we encounter, by virtue of Scarry's masterful phrasing, the feel of the small scale of that world where 'dead bolts turn . . . over in their brass beds.' This is a book to which we must put an ear." -BRIAN TEARE, author of Companion Grasses | Siobhán Scarry earned an MFA in creative writing from the University of Montana and a PhD in Poetics from SUNY Buffalo. Her poems have appeared in Colorado Review, jubilat, New Letters, Sentence: A Journal of Prose Poetics, and elsewhere. She lives and teaches in the Pacific Northwest.