Lapis by Kerri Webster

Description

Wesleyan University Press, paperback

Publication Date: August 2, 2022

Publisher marketing: In Lapis, poet Kerri Webster writes into the vast space left by the deaths of three women: her mother, a mentor, and a friend. Using a wide array of lyric forms and meditations, Webster explores matrilineages both familial and poetic, weaving together death, spirituality, women, and a sense of the shifting earth into one “doctrine of Non-linear Revelation.”

Elegy

And I was equal to my longing:
the mums blackening;
sorrow a carboned figurine;
the firmament steaming; your ashes
interred in the boulder;
the ugly birds crying dolor dolor dolor;
the sky smoke-choked—what, then,
would you have had be my register?
As the beasts of the field rub their antlers off
with ooh-itch pleasure; as the screen says
You often open around this time; as the grapes
blight: listen: sometimes
we’re the pilgrim, sometimes
we’re the site.

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