Renunciation

Renunciation introduces a powerful new poet whose work, though it treads the ground of silence and loss, bears a redemptive grace. Disquieting and healing, Corey Marks's poems hold to "a moment when possibility / bristles so close it holds a shape in the air."

The sculptor Gislebertus, Doubting Thomas, Theseus, and John Keats share space in the pages of Renunciation with a survivor of the bomb in Hiroshima, a blind girl in the South American jungle, and DeSoto's thirteen swine in the hold of a ship bound for America. Rich with almost palpable nuances of light and sound, Marks's lyric meditations unravel a constant play of loss and continuation, "mending sense from spare threads" and hovering over connections undone even as they are made.