Anna Meister
ISBN: 978-1-949099-00-3
24 pages
In a language sensuous, vivid & entirely her own, Meister crafts a loving catalogue of incompleteness. Instead of claiming solid ground, she litters the path with questions. Her couplets see-saw between presence & loss, between as is & as if. "All day I stitch, attempting to keep things / together." Meister's line is a thread, cut suddenly by her teeth, only to begin a thought anew, only to be bit through again. She forgoes seamlessness, binaries of right or wrong, healed or broken. Instead, she prizes intimacy, boldly turning toward us to ask, "Why is this the story / I seem to need to tell?" Each poem startles us, rightly so, out of resolution & into humanness — where we are transparent & grappling & sometimes, even grateful.