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Clear or wholly settled, not even the veins on the underside of a leaf, its freedoms.
At once tender and fierce, concise and associative, Laurie Sheck’s Captivity charts and explores the textures and movements of mind in her gorgeous, long-lined poetry. Placed at intervals throughout the book are poems the author calls “Removes,” which take their initial impulse from American captivity narratives and constitute a profoundly felt inquiry into what is familiar and what is strange, what it means to be displaced and radically apart, and how disruption itself becomes its own kind of opportunity. The poems describe a psychic territory both desolate and exultant, as Sheck embraces the fragmentary, yet stays alert to what remains “mysteriously standing.” She writes, “Thinking has a quiet skin. But I feel the break and fled of things inside it. ” In Captivity, Sheck illuminates this shadow-thought world that governs what we are and attains provocative glimpses of the fluid self.
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Laurie Sheck,
1953 Stein asked what is the difference. She did not ask what is the sameness. Did not ask what like is. Or proximity. Resemblance. Did not ask what child of what patriarch what height what depth didn’t use a question mark but still wondered at the difference what mutinies it carries over what vast Arctic what far shore.
What is the difference between blind and bond. Between desk and red. Between capsize and sail. Between commodity and question. A lively thing, a fractured thing. To smile at the difference.
(Such gray clouds passing over. Thick, wet sky.)
What is the difference between mutiny and dust. Between noose and edge. Between brittle and obey.
Between shunned and stun. What is the difference.
As now, Mary Shelley’s monster flees to the north, his sack of books his lone companions.