[04/10/26] Alford, Lucy: Daylight / Savings

The measure of Alford’s exquisite poems, their current and tender, is the image shorn; that this is so speaks to the assiduous enterprise of giving “these gnawed globes” the chance to graze each other (the thrilling quiet before a human syntax settles on our attentional ardor). The exposure and pry to which they are attuned—a low-burning canticle’s “unobtrusive mass,” as Dickinson might say—register the extent to which “the work of beginning” is already beginning, with us and not. Plainsong, dredge: we find here, learn therein, the startling humble of consecration. This book of salt thought makes a meal of the rind. -Michael Snediker

Subversive is an overused compliment, but these poems with their attention on the oyster’s taste, the braiding of onions, the swell of boiled peanuts, and so many kinds of apples read as seditious. They point to how to be in relationship not just with each other but with the sorts of noticing that are temporal and seasonal, the sorts that cannot be parsed or commodified by this algorithmic era. -Juliana Spahr