Cecilia Woloch

No American story is confined to a single continent—we’ve had too much history—and Cecilia Woloch’s fifth collection moves from rural Kentucky to the Carpathian mountains in Eastern Europe. Her traveling poetics are striking in the way that she defies the borders of “narrative” and “lyric”; she combines the two seamlessly, an enviable gift. A series of “postcard” prose poems, addressed to other poets, is remarkable—and makes one wish Woloch were a friend so she’d send show more such a postcard from her travels. But the poems about her father’s death resonated most deeply—elegy is one form we all share—and even those poems which are not directly addressing his passing carry a sort of lament. An example is “What Is This?”: “It’s a pillow for the invisible, a pillow for shadows, a pillow for ghosts. / It’s a pillow against which the heads of the dead are lain to awaken them.” show less