Crane - by Tessa Bolsover (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A poetic investigation of sound, language, and liminality.

Interweaving distilled prose and shardlike verse, Crane reexamines two figures from Greco-Roman myth: Cardea, the little-known goddess of hinges, and Echo, the nymph whose body is transformed into reflective sound. Constellating personal narrative, etymological fragments, and meditations on language, the book's first section unearths a poetics of the hinge. The second section, "Delay Figure," investigates the relationality of sound, the affective capacities of the nonlinguistic voice, and the dissolution of the desiring body, taking as its guiding figure the aural phenomena of echoes as well as their mythological personification. "Inlet," the book's final section, is a sequence of lyric poems that revolve around questions of time, detritus, and transformation, tracing ellipses of intimacy and illness, duration, and ecological precarity. Crane is at once an elegy and a meditation on liminality, envisioning the threshold as a site saturated both with violence and dynamic mutability.

Review Quotes

"Each word, each name in Crane strikes a balance between the art of divination and the heresy of uncertainty. Moving in mid-air, suspending names across shadow wires thrown open to light, the poet steps out into thin air with poise and precision, discovering in the resonance of allusive echoes a singular shimmering radiance."--Susan Howe

"The title too takes flight: Bolsover's Crane reimagines myth in the poetics of the hinge, shifting selves, desire and loss, a lyric encounter with the limn of transformation. I love its investigative impulses and how it journeys in essayistic and verse forms. A necessary delving that traces experiences in language, endurance, and fragments. Staggering, smart, and powerful."--Hoa Nguyen

"Crane is a chorus of dynamic, singing calendars that are both written and ridden at the threshold to arrive at the holy instant of suspension. Crane's pilgrimage seeks the mutable aura of language via the porosity of myth as a relational mechanism held in a communal diaphragm, in the instant of delay, of synchronous lucidity. The reader dissolves, re-adheres, and pours back into our multivocal mouth, 'rearranged by wind.'"--Lucía Hinojosa Gaxiola

"Crane reveals poetry's palpable design upon us through its intricate exploration of intersections--or hinges--between beings (human, animal, mythical), between epochs, sequences, genres, teachers and protégés, and the hidden, subterranean realms that underlie our material world. Bolsover's work creates a space where urban time (commuter time) collides with an older, slower rhythm of time measured by natural phenomena. Her poems resonate with echoic language that shapes not just space but also our understanding of connection, possibility, and the fragile yet profound relationship between worlds often perceived as separate. What moves me most is how Crane endows its readers with the power of poetry itself--an invitation to see the unseen, to map out lush and abundant meanings even in the face of chronic political despair. This is a seemingly quiet, elegant book that understands civic poetry as a call to action--a call to restore imagination as an essential force for envisioning and creating a better-shared future."--Stacy Szymaszek

"Crane is a chorus of dynamic, singing calendars that are both written and ridden at the threshold to arrive at the holy instant of suspension. Crane's pilgrimage seeks the mutable aura of language via the porosity of myth as a relational mechanism held in a communal diaphragm, in the instant of delay, of synchronous lucidity. The reader dissolves, re-adheres, and pours back into our multivocal mouth, 'rearranged by wind.'"--Lucía Hinojosa Gaxiola

"The title too takes flight: Bolsover's Crane reimagines myth in the poetics of the hinge, shifting selves, desire, and loss, a lyric encounter with the limn of transformation. I love its investigative impulses and how it journeys in essayistic and verse forms. A necessary delving that traces experiences in language, endurance, and fragments. Staggering, smart, and powerful."--Hoa Nguyen

About the Author

Tessa Bolsover is a poet based in Durham, NC. She holds an MFA from Brown University and is currently pursuing a PhD at Duke. She is also a founding editor of the publishing project auric press. Crane is her first book.