Dereliction by Gabrielle Octavia Rucker

DERELICTION, Gabrielle Octavia Rucker's debut collection of poetry, moves through childhood and into the afterlife with poems that evoke an artful and urgent sense of the author's "insatiable wandering." With cinematic imagery and formal variation, these poems effortlessly find dream-life and myth transforming the daily actions of talking on the phone or finding your reflection in the window. The bracing intimacy of Rucker's voice invites us into a precise and carefully constructed world in which we are asked to question what it means to "do the human things," and where the poet eventually asks the reader, and possibly poetry itself, "What bloody lens holds firm between this mystery & us?" "Gabrielle Rucker's Dereliction considers an afterlife without any sense of resignation, cups the end times in hands that make and remake. 'A voice starts singing, closing in on the life-force below,' this song making vision raw, like looking at the sun through closed eyes. The voice may be 'hatc