Calf Canyon: Poems: 10 (Mineral Point Poetry)

I am trying to tell my unborn daughter a story. It is an old storythat hangs on the spinneret tip of a spiders abdomen the spiders heart a bruise each chamber a stitch that nicks the copper bloodas it rushes through each valve sighing outlike the hush that hunglodged in everyones lungs a silence stacked between plates on the drying rack a thrum that vibrated the blades of his kitchen knives.With long-limbed free verse and highly textured prose Calf Canyon builds an origin myth with uncertain consequences and bald violence. McCartt-Jackson imagines a landscape where memories are permeable physical places: the watersides of rural Kentucky and the Ozarks give way to the dry gulches and deep ravines of California as the speaker attains adulthood and her relationships become more fraught with danger.So this: / you didnt mean to / tear out the part of you you didnt like / by tearing out a part of me / for the sixth seventh eighth twelfth time you decided: / love was my heart / the size of your fist.Domestic meditations vine with the thorns of the natural world in a collection that is bare-handed wind-polished and visceral and McCartt-Jacksons command of imagery leaves the reader with sculptural playback of brutal love and resonant feelings. This is a collection to read beginning to end and from the end to the first poem interleaving the pages with marginalia tears and the readers own memories. Rarely does a poet bend such gifted formal craft to the requirements of fierce feeling.