Overview
In a careful examination of personal and collective histories, David Keplingerās IceĀ indexes the findings from memoryās slow meltāstories and faces weāve forgotten, bones hidden in frost.
āI am asking how much more / I have to learn from this,ā KeplingerĀ writes. āYou are asking that same question.ā In these poems, he turns to our predecessors for guidance in picking apart the forces that govern modernityāmasculinity, power, knowledge, conquest. Cryptic visitants arrive in the form of Gilgamesh, āsearching for a way to stay in pain foreverā; a grandmother mending socks, āher face in the dark unchangingā;Ā Emily Dickinson, lingering at her window; a lion cub, asleep in ice for millennia.
With each comes a critique of the Anthropocene, our drive to possess the unpossessable. With each comes also the discovery of whatāand whoāweāve harmed in the discovering. Ice shelves collapse. Climate change melts layers of permafrost to reveal a severed wolfās head. A pair of grease-smudged reading glasses calls up a motherās phantom. āI am sorry / for the parts you gave me / that Iāve misshapen,āĀ KeplingerĀ writes.
SoĀ is there āa point to all this singingā? Our ancestors cannot answer. The wolfās head canāt, either. But sometimes, āout of the snow of confusion,āĀ somethingĀ answers, āsaying gorgeous things like yes.ā And the flowers āopen up / their small green trumpets anyway.ā
This book title, Ice (Poems), ISBN: 9781639550166, by David Keplinger, published by Milkweed Editions (August 8, 2023) is available in paperback. Our minimum order quantity is 25 copies. All standard bulk book orders ship FREE in the continental USA and delivered in 4-10 business days.
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