Mortar

<p><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1); background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0)>In </span><em style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1); background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0)>Mortar</em><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1); background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0)> Christopher Shipman confronts the legacy of his grandmother's murder and the weight it presses across generations. Moving by accretion-prose lyric and fragmented poems each layering fact dream and invention-the collection returns to the brick with incantatory force at once the weapon of the crime and the figure of its aftermath. The night is long I mean generations Shipman writes and the poems enact that long night's tension always approaching the house of the murder always on the verge of witnessing the violence itself like the scene in the movie that scatters birds. Alongside these hauntings life persists: a father with his daughter a husband pursuing simple dailiness. Restless inventive and tender </span><em style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1); background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0)>Mortar</em><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1); background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0)> transforms trauma into lyric witness-a fearless book haunted by what it cannot release. -Kerrin McCadden author of </span><em style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1); background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0)>American Wake </em></p><p></p>