Description
Poetry. Winner of the 2015 Burnside Review Press Book Award, selected by Mary Syzbist. "'To mark' means many things: to stain, to sign, to correct, to celebrate. Montreux Rotholtz's UNMARK ambitiously means much more, performing and undoing those acts, correcting definitions, understandings, and then unraveling those corrections in a headlong, fearless drive toward what is 'just.' These poems leave only what 'claw[s] to remain'—and astonish with the lushness inside that leanness, where 'the hot cloud [is] slung/around us,' and the 'pale green coronas' of 'lit sea-lanterns' 'fill the space.' Lyric traditions—confession, fable, love poem, elegy, fugue, prayer—ghost through these constantly inventive poems and let us hear the strangeness of language, its overabundance and partialness, the way it both dissociates and connects. The beautiful, sensual intensity of these poems is haunted, assured: each one leans toward us, 'feeling / for [our] fragile pressures,' to 'clarify [our] ear.'"—Mary Syzbist
Author Bio
Montreux Rotholtz is the author of UNMARK, selected by Mary Szybist as the winner of the 2015 Burnside Review Press Book Award. Her poems appear in Prelude, Boston Review, jubilat, Lana Turner, PEN Poetry Series, Fence, and elsewhere. She lives in Seattle.
Author City: Seattle, WA USA