Robinson, Elizabeth: Thirst & Surfeit

Threadsuns Press, paperback Publication Date: August 15, 2023 Publisher Marketing: History, like "light untied and undone," disperses itself across time and memory. The poems in THIRST & SURFEIT reach into these fragments to interpret and sing interactions of human and environment, spirit and subsistence. Whether exhuming a bog body, riding swells with a woman pirate, rediscovering a long lost garden, or lofting a futile resistance to an oppressive regime, the protagonists in these poems understand that the "barest contraction/makes birth into exile." Reclamation is a practice of resilience, of resourcefulness: that is what these historical fragments and splinters reveal. They pierce our complacency with the terms of survival: "What is real/deforms its witnesses." Hunger signals necessity and aspiration, both thirst and surfeit. Drawing on the resources of the past, these poems make the present resonant and immediate. "In Elizabeth Robinson's enlivening THIRST & SURFEIT, the re