(New Issues, 4/21/2020)
* New & Noteworthy: Winner of the 2019 Green Rose Prize, selected by Forrest Gander, Sarah Gridley’s Insofar is an intellectually generous wandering through the poet’s interior wilderness. The book is organized as an abecedarian, where nature and private language, whether conceptual or literal, live as one, fluctuating as though tidal. Featuring poems for strangers, fellow poets and writers, habitats, myths, and objects, Insofar is subtle, understated, whispered. Gridley has the power to draw the reader further into her unique world, with existential curiosity and rapt attention, leaving us to meander, questioning, through art, literature, and philosophy. One finds it utterly delectable to feel as though the poem’s knowing is actively created simultaneous to its reading. “The child found the bridge above the river. / Fog took its net of water to their face. // Sky was a circuitous idiom. Willow was a new school / of reflection. From Stars, they learned to sew.” This is a collection of intimate contemplation, a book which elicits respect and wonder.
