Defensible Space/If a Crow-- - by Ian Lockaby (Paperback)

About the Book

"Considering how we might detox from old languages, systems, and modes of life, Ian Lockaby's poems seek out new forms of interconnectivity and possibility, finding the energy of emerging worlds along the edges of ruins. This collection poses questions of how to thrive in aftermaths, suggesting that attempts at absolute knowledge are less powerful than an embrace of the unknown. Throughout these poems, Lockaby uses crows as a model for dynamic adaption and creative entanglement with the world and with language, finding "defensible space" for new lyrical syntax amid shifts and desolation: "Everywhere a burning root system. Everywhere, a root fire crowing off the splayed tail feathers of a crow." Defensible Space/if a crow-looks towards a reintroduction of fire into wilds and wilds into our lives, taking the unknown of an "if" as the base from where we can build life"--

Book Synopsis

Experimental poetry that embraces shifts, adaptation, and the unknown as a means to move beyond old and dying worlds.

Considering how we might detox from old languages, systems, and modes of life, Ian Lockaby's poems seek out new forms of interconnectivity and possibility, finding the energy of emerging worlds along the edges of ruins. This collection poses questions of how to thrive in aftermaths, suggesting that attempts at absolute knowledge are less powerful than an embrace of the unknown. Throughout these poems, Lockaby uses crows as a model for dynamic adaption and creative entanglement with the world and with language, finding "defensible space" for new lyrical syntax amid shifts and desolation: "Everywhere a burning root system. Everywhere, a root fire crowing off the splayed tail feathers of a crow."

Defensible Space/if a crow--looks towards a reintroduction of fire into wilds and wilds into our lives, taking the unknown of an "if" as the base from where we can build life.

Defensible Space/if a crow- won Omnidawn's 2022 Poetry Chapbook contest, selected by Ruth Ellen Kocher.

Review Quotes

"There's such a precision to [Lockaby's] lyric progressions, casual and easygoing and exact across such wonderful pacing."--Rob McLennan "Rob McLennan' blog"

"Written in the excluded middle between if and then, this gorgeously anarchic serial poem offers not alternative logic, but an alternative to logic. Persisting as 'a threat to the structure, ' where 'the structure' is private property or lyric propriety or anthropocentricism, Defensible Space/if a crow-- performs a way of being textual that's meant 'to true / the obligation' to other species while being true to human experience too. Beloved and lovelorn, ecstatic and addicted, outdoors and indoors, we join crows, whales, and termites--air, water, and earth--and reader we fly, swim, and chew through this elemental poetics whose finely tuned lines intertwine human and more-than-human lives and hungers."--Brian Teare, author of "Poem Bitten by a Man"

"Entering this manuscript was like entering a spell. The work immediately opened to a landscape where 'a black ice cube pressed / against the grain of the sun' mirrors the crow which hangs like a specter in the atmosphere of this book. The measured line sometimes pitches into lyric scattered across the page and at other times aggregates, pulling itself in tightly as the speaker explains that 'Inside of this life . . . / is another life / I cannot claim.' This poet's embrace of a stuttering utterance is masterful as the interstitial pause dominates a page so that we are caught up in the trepidation of a beingness that 'bursts into a thousand fledglings.' The book's refrain takes us, through the conditional made image--if, a crow--from the tucked-in voice of a naturally lugubrious landscape to a joy that is ordered, numbered, and measured, that is, joy that is joy precisely because of the limitations of joy. I feel blessed to have met this book but more, to have experienced a poetics brave enough to embrace the unbearable as transformative."--Ruth Ellen Kocher, from the judge's citation for the 2022 Omnidawn Poetry Chapbook Prize

"Lockaby's Defensible Space/if a crow--hums in the steady silver rhythms of a hymn whose feeling has gotten in, desires to get out, and once out--'I don't know'--the pleasure burns out. Or, chooses again. These poems evoke the feeling of a constant, cold, damp, summer of the Pacific Northwest. A hazy herbarium of plants, seeds, and vegetables. A recurring whale, waxing neotropical poetics as black wings, ash, the remains of what came prior. In love, a reason--'I wanted to make one rhyme with you'--recast as the smoldering of a poet's quire. Sometimes we must burn the thing before we finish it, begin again. It is devotion, aftershocks stirred deep within the fiery Earth, an unrelenting quiet devotion of tremors inside these icy roots."--fahima ife, author "Septet for the Luminous Ones"

About the Author

Ian Lockaby is a poet, translator, and editor of the journal mercury firs. He is the author of the chapbook A Seam of Electricity, and his poetry has been published in journals including Fence, Bennington Review, Poetry Northwest, Ecotone, Volt, and Denver Quarterly. His translations of Latin American poetry have been published in Black Warrior Review, Circumference, Washington Square Review, and others. For many years he lived in and around Olympia, WA, where he worked on vegetable farms, and he now lives in New Orleans.