Museum of Distance
This debut collection has drawn widespread praise as an “Ovidian adventure” that blurs the “boundaries between the quotidian and the fantastic,” and for its use of thousands of images that “play a kind of dream-tag, each one prompting the next.” An assistant dean at Westminster College in Salt Lake City, Ashley Seitz Kramer has won the Ruth Stone Prize, the Robert and Adele Schiff Prize, and the Utah Writers’ Award.
Hound
You circle your own house with your dog
who knows when to sit before you ask him
as if both of you learned the same word
in different languages. You trust his language
more. He wakes when you wake dreaming
about the same high grasses. Another word.
No one knocks now when the snow
makes of you a warmer planet. So much
for the terror of your first child’s first seizure.
So much for the collision of cars, the spray
of glass, a brown belt left on the seat of a blue van
at the bodyshop. Did those people make it?
No. This kind of terror takes years to be made
like the fog that has settled on all the kitchen
tumblers. First the water, then its reason.
It takes years to arrive and when it does
even your dog, who is otherwise oblivious
to history and always a good boy, will whimper
for you in your own terrible language.
Reviewed by
Matt Sutherland
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. No fee was paid by the publisher for this review. Foreword Reviews only recommends books that we love. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
