BOOKS

The Slip

By Kary Wayson

Winner of the 2017 Burnside Review Press Book Award, Selected by Suzanne Buffam

“Kary Wayson entrusts her whole art to the ludic music of language, seeking its way, syllable by syllable, phrase by sprightly turn of phrase, through way stations of feeling. She is funny and devastated and electrifying at every turn: ‘…he held down my knot / with a finger in the center the / better to tie my bow—’; ‘I’ve followed my thinking like a man out driving / —and just back there he missed the turn.’ These poems make me laugh out loud and blink back sudden tears. Mostly, though, they leave me slack-jawed at their lexical, logical, and wildly various tonal grace. For anyone seeking to survive primal loss and keep singing, Kary Wayson shows the way.”

—Suzanne Buffam

“The Slip is a lesson in music. The nuances of syntax and line break here are not just poetic measures: they’re roadmaps. These poems show us how to breathe. This is the kind of lyricism that lets us slow down and live. And that, dear reader, is precisely why I love Kary Wayson’s work.”

—Ilya Kaminsky

American Husband

by Kary Wayson 

The Ohio State University Press / Winner of The Journal Award in Poetry

Life is a mystery, a puzzle, “a house of inscrutable signals,” leaving us “often stranded in the middle of a feeling.” With exquisite manipulation of language, the poems in this collection seek to unravel the mystery and solve the puzzle by parsing everyday experiences—observing life while lying about on the couch, on the floor, in bed and out—and everyday relationships—between the self and the mother, the self and the father, the self and the lover, the self and the self, and the self and god. English, “the telephone and the telephone book and the table with one vase and the cut rose,” is the means through which Wayson, drawing not only on her own wisdom but also on that of Sylvia Plath, Emily Dickinson, Shajahana, Mother Goose, Federico Garcia Lorca, Edward Gorey, and others, enacts intersections between self and meaning. At each intersection, love’s loneliness forms and dissolves, expands and contracts, and then passes much like weather, or the mysterious changeable relationship between silence and words. Wayson may feel that she lives “with a desk where nothing gets done,” but with every poem she finds “some nook or cranny to plumb, some crook or nanny dumb enough to tell them what,” and another puzzle piece falls in place.