The Size of Your Joy
Poets are cheek turners, reliably willing to face grief and pain at untenable levels and then ask for more. Poets are coat turners, inexplicably willing to renounce and swerve just as the path seems laid. In her debut collection, Elise Powers looks skyward to joy while reckoning with what she assumes to be her birthright of heartache. Indeed, she appears to discover playfulness like a puppy locating its tail for the first time. Powers’s work earned runner-up honors in the Black Horse Review Poetry Contest, in addition to being shortlisted for the Central Avenue Poetry Prize. With her daughter and husband, she lives in Seattle.
BREAKING FORMATION
Every morning
and every evening,
a line of pelicans
snakes a ride
on a warm wind,
skates the shoreline,
wings barely moving, as if they were born
knowing this path—
something handed down
without explanation.
Sometimes I’ll see one break formation,
drift a little higher
than the others, catch a rebellious current
and, for the length
of a held breath,
forget its rank,
remember
the endless sky.
Reviewed by
Matt Sutherland
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