Plum, Hilary: Excisions

Black Lawrence Press, paperback Publication Date: April 21, 2023 Publisher Marketing: EXCISIONS investigates the feeling-the problem and the syntax-of being on a threshold. If you don't know what will happen next, you can't yet say what has happened. These poems arise from states of precise unknowing, desperate imagination, inchoate emotion, encounters with mortality and power when they're closing in but haven't caught you yet. What is choice, given the terms of an ill body, survival in a grotesque empire? Tenderly and acutely, these poems examine the life of before and after: when something is excised from you, it was you, and you are what remains. "Out of hospitals, marriage bedrooms, woodland parks and city centers-the vanishing borders between the healthy and the sick-Hilary Plum's poems emerge hard-edged and fully formed. She is dynamically attuned to the fragility and ferociousness of our attachments to one another, "a long storm of hello." Densely lyrical and possessed of auster