Acreage

While loss and desire are at the heart of these poems, they don’t stay there for very long. Instead, almost every one of the poems in this volume seeks transformation. The man trapped in his illness, who has become nothing more than “a place to hang a coat,” imagines trading his bed for an iron lung to relieve his family of having to see or touch him. He is able, finally, to transform out of that bodily iron lung to spirit. And the horse thief uncle, skating across the St. Lawrence River, imagines his body becoming the beloved Morgan he’d had to leave behind. By the end of the poem, the uncle has transformed into his beautiful horse and was never heard from again. What the author does not provide is an answer to how the transformations occur—only a confident voice that they do occur—giving hope that loss can be transformative.