The Migratory Moment: Everything anything - Nothing at all...

Migratory Moment by Marnie Holt Swenson is a hybrid book of poetry dialogue and paintings that examines an anguished speakers view of her origins through memories.Vernacular and fractured lines sift truth from fiction creating a moving erratic portrait of fragility and loss that spirals into a puzzle I cannot solve. Whether the titular moment refers to the speakers sense of time on earth the desire for light from a destabilized world or an implosion that results in being remade this is a work of sustained raw intensity. Survival becomes art.The book navigates between the story of a woman who believes herself to have been an unwanted birth a thing of despair; the confusion of family relationships; a fathers suicide; and questions from a therapist. As the speaker confronts her own past spiritual ambivalence and childhood scenes weave together in a dark pastiche.A series of oil paintings reveal the story in an oblique way.Karen Rigby Foreword Reviews