A record of visionary experience in the wake of loss

In Lapis, poet Kerri Webster writes into the vast space left by the deaths of three women: her mother, a mentor, and a friend. Using a wide array of lyric forms and meditations, Webster explores matrilineages both familial and poetic, weaving together death, spirituality, women, and a sense of the shifting earth into one "doctrine of Non-linear Revelation."

Elegy

And I was equal to my longing:
the mums blackening;
sorrow a carboned figurine;
the firmament steaming; your ashes
interred in the boulder;
the ugly birds crying dolor dolor dolor;
the sky smoke-choked--what, then,
would you have had be my register?
As the beasts of the field rub their antlers off
with ooh-itch pleasure; as the screen says
You often open around this time; as the grapes
blight: listen: sometimes
we're the pilgrim, sometimes
we're the site.

Author: Kerri Webster
Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Published: 08/30/2022
Series: Wesleyan Poetry
Pages: 96
Weight: 0.38lbs
Size: 8.94h x 6.09w x 0.32d
ISBN: 9780819500083


Review Citation(s):
Library Journal 09/23/2022 pg. 1

About the Author

KERRI WEBSTER (Boise, ID) is the author of the poetry collections The Trailhead, We Do Not Eat Our Hearts Alone, and Grand & Arsenal, the latter of which won the Iowa Poetry Prize. The recipient of awards from the Whiting Foundation and the Poetry Society of America, she was a Visiting Writer-in-Residence at Washington University in St. Louis from 2006-2010. She currently teaches at Boise State University.