and the sun, now like us in its transit,
limited and mortal,
always rising from “Last Eclipse”
Paperback, 94 pages. Ships from BlazeVOX [books].
“Associative, wounded, silly, and suddenly devastating.”
“A personal and intimate portrait of a ‘scrapyard forest.’”
“Nothing remains merely itself.”
“Poems that whittle a language from the edges of distress.”
“An elegance to these poems, but also a sweetness, and wit too.”
A lay down yard is the part of a scrapyard where materials rest until somebody finds a use for them. Eric Wertheimer’s third collection works the same ground: poems gathered over a long migration—the Arizona desert, the Gowanus Canal, the inlets of the North Fork—and stacked where the light can get at them.
The subjects run wide. Trees and tech. Early America. Fatherhood, marriage, a Cooper’s hawk, an eclipse (two, actually). Some poems hit the lyric clean. Some speak in glitched sentences. A few just make bad jokes, on purpose.
