Quiver: Poems (Volume 31) (21st Century Poets)
(By Luke Johnson)
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— Patricia Smith , author of Poems
“ Quiver is a rare creation full of song and scar, authenticity and Old Testament mythology, of emotional complexity and witness."
— John Sibley Williams, Scale Model of a Country at Dawn
"The poems [in Quiver ] are singing when they are stinging, scalding as they serve up something wildly fresh, slap after exquisite slap."
— Elaine Sexton , author of Drive
"...a work of glorious complexity."
— Ellen Bass
"...the most visceral, haunting book of poems I have read in years."
— Lee Herrick , California Poet Laureate
Quiver is a book of reckoning, a book of ghosts, a book of lineal fracture and generational fatherlesness. It’s a visceral guide through boyhood into fatherhood. One that yields witness to trauma, erotic shames, brutalities and toxic masculinity, and in so doing, emerges with a speaker beginning to free himself. Patricia Smith said it “ Quiver will change the way you see.”
...
“floodghost”
Mother couldn’t manage
what sated me, so she
sought in silence
a substance that’d soothe,
something familial with grace.
I groaned. Broke bodies
over blacktop’s pane, a bottom-
less well of blood. At seven
I smothered a frog and fed each leg
to my quivering sister
laughed while she choked out its skin. At twelve,
I pulled a pistol from under
the vacant shed and shoved
its shudder to a schoolboy’s temple, teased
while he wept in his piss.
And yet all along a Psalm, a satchel
of song. Mother making
contracts with the sky, while I
tore its pages to light a fire, warm
my hands around it. Radiant blue. Red
from a faraway pine.”
