Graeper, Garth: The Sky Broke More

Winter Editions, paperback Publication Date: May 9, 2023 Publisher Marketing: Blending ecopoetics, ghost story, and sci-fi thriller, Garth Graeper's first full-length collection imagines survival in a world where nature, time, and identity are unstable and predatory. Inspired by sources as wide-ranging as Tarkovsky's Stalker, the comic book character Swamp Thing, and Romantic visionary Dorothy Wordsworth, Graeper's first full-length collection abounds with transmogrifications. Teetering between intimacy and apocalypse, no body, or tree, or sound stays intact for long. No sooner exorcized from a ghostly possession in the Lake District, the reader is driven back into the water cycle, raining down from the sky to feed plants, or reawakened from a dream, trying to grasp a hand, to remember a face. In this ecosystem, where "caught between tall lilacs / bodies spill," green meadows offer less a bucolic backdrop than a site of aggressive reclamation. Propelled by terse language and thorn-shar