Imprecise Perishing by Alexandra Barylski, NWVS # 131

In Imprecise Perishing, Alex Stott explores the renegotiations of identity, relationships, and faith that arise when the body is in a state of dis-ease. Moving in and out of various formal arrangements that mirror the shape-shifting illness requires of the ill, she turns the situation of chronic illness over in her hands, letting the light catch it from various angles. With tumbling sounds, and startling language and imagery, these poems lead us into, and guide us through, what eventually we all must face: the vulnerability and mystery of “our unsolvable bodies.”

–Molly Spencer, poet and assistant poetry editor at The Rumpus

The poems collected here reveal the paradox of illness, which strikes its victim as so unnatural, so transgressive, so…rude: the uninvited colonist with smallpox, the opportunistic doctor who cares less for the life of Henrietta Lacks than for immortality, for endless reproduction. And yet sickness is nothing more shocking than the attachment and growth of the wrong things in the wrong places. It is, ultimately, the most natural thing in the world. It’s the ivy overgrowing the wall, and weeds grown wild over the graves of those we love. But in this context, the stubborn, repeated rituals of love shine, for the reader, with new meaning. Faith, in these poems, is a father tending the roses that grow among the dead, and a husband and wife toweling the dishes dry.

–Jessica Mesman Griffith, author of Love and Salt: A Spiritual Friendship in Letters.