Quarantine

“Shorn of figurative flourish, of adjectival acumen, of nearly any noticeable rhetoric to flesh the bone of the event, these poems do not progress to closure so much as abase themselves before it. Yet, as one reads the collection as a whole — appreciating the variation in formal strategies between the book's two sequences, "Quarantine" and "Contagion," as well as the vortices of meaning created by repetitions of words within a poem and of events which mirror across the book's expanse to meet at the book's center — one recognizes techniques akin to a cubist painter's arrestingly suggestive edges and over-lays. Such deft formal construction causes even the darkest self-inflicted accusations and society-excoriating allegations to grow koan-ish, setting a reader's moral compass off balance and spinning. In this vertiginous state, meanings that we attest to any seemingly explicatble cause-and-effect or ethical summing up begin to slip, slur, distend, disavow themselves, even though the presented content of any given phrase remains simple, direct, even unequivocal.”—from the review by Rusty Morrison in Rain Taxi

“In 40 verse sections and several brief prose interludes, Henry (Graft) portrays a nameless Englishman dying of plague in 1665. His protagonist remembers key bits of his life (in reverse order, from most recent to longest ago) as he lies in a field beside the dead bodies of his wife and son; he may have brought the disease home from a nearby river where he met young men for anonymous sex. Henry's doomed husband recalls his life in rapt, halting lines without punctuation, indebted to W.S. Merwin: his wife ‘did not scream like my son / she died just the same hot and in pain / I will die silent I will tell my story as I die.’ Though horrid vistas recur throughout—‘the bodies on fire in the river for days’—the greatest pain is inward, as he regrets a life unlived: ‘If I could burrow into the dirt / beneath my back I would fracture / the earth in return.’ Henry, an editor of Verse magazine, takes his speaker's voice to a gritty extreme.” —Publishers Weekly