A Swale a Sort of Swaddle
by Abby Walthausen
51 Poems ~ 89 pages
Format: 6 x 9 ~ Perfect Bound
Price: $18.00
Publisher: Spuytenduyvil.net
ISBN: 978-1-963908-61-9
To Order: Bookshop.org
ABOUT THE BOOK:
A Swale a Sort of Swaddle is a new collection whose poems map two
overlapping territories – the landscape of an unfamiliar city (Los Angeles)
and the intimate ecosystem of life with an infant. Both lands are
impossibly parched and lush at once.
ADVANCE PRAISE:
Abby Walthausen's A Swale a Sort of Swaddle is a prismatic eco-thematic
collection, intimately alert to the scary wonders of new motherhood in a
world seething through various convulsions. Her lines move with sharp, high
levels of proprioception. Taut and fluid, she crafts a haptic Dickinsonian music
which is truly the sign of an original poet and a major new voice in American
poetry.
–Ishion Hutchinson, author of "House of Lords and Commons and School for Instructions"
The speakers of Abby Walthausen's A Swale a Sort of Swaddle contemplate
motherhood, religion, domesticity, displacement, and the natural world with
dark humor and sonic virtuosity. These poems expose the "gruesome" "touch
tank"
world as at once holy and absurd. It's a borderland place of wonder and
doom
–Kim Young author "Night Radio and Tigers"
Developmental cairns of early family life are granted electric treatment in A
Swale a Sort of Swaddle. The valor in Abby Walthausen's poems, as in the valor
of motherhood, is found in her flights of devotion and self-trust that are weird
intimate, and original. Haptic hazard and delight. Reliquary in manila
pockets, melding butters."One day language, great byproduct of saliva /will,
be my only fungus, my hope / to carry those essential signals." Each poem
works philosophical and quotidian registers, sings high comedy in the
loaded syntax of Walthausen's singular heartmind.
–Sara Ellen Fowler, author of "Two Signatures"
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Abby Walthausen is a writer and teacher living in Los Angeles. She hosts a
poetry podcast called "A Lovely Wallpaper," which is part interview and part
learning poems by memory.
FROM THE BOOK:
DOCKING
by Abby Walthausen
Puffed up and a week late
you were suspended and hard to coax
like me in an adopted city, never close
to the ocean as the palms showed,
so bobbing in an inland pool.
And I didn't know the names of plants here
except for those I'd known on sills – jade and pencil –
here monstrous enough to fill
yards and yard scrap bins:
abundance
and ignorance,
no name yet.
The doctors sought the unnamed too – one said the za is done
but I'd been settling in this sprawling patchwork, so I knew it was the concha
that was done and pink
and crackling
yet unwilling, I got it, the way we both dissociated –
as though competing for the role
(I know, I did not invent this) of Dr. Caligari's somnambulist –
and when you won – resisting all inductions –
they tucked in and they went gorey
and we were glad we'd named you valiantly, victor full of fricative sounds
because, again, the rush:
not one single photo from these bursts
captured a salty scream or your big hands shaking
like some little crust picked from a tide pool
and dropped a few crags from home.
Gruesome, we know, but fortune
has your folding mind showing soon
how those hands belong to you.
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