Imaginary Royalty

This long-awaited second collection from Field (Swallow) ebbs and flows amid the passing of time and the shifting nature of familial connection. The book builds in the impressionistic manner of memory: snapshot by snapshot, Field’s narrator shows a “nebula of sisters” growing into mothers, even while each remains a part of the original family. A long elegiac poem anchors the collection; one sister has suffered an unimaginable tragedy. Field captures the self-annihilating nature of grief: “the heart, blindsided, stunned, needs urgent care, but instinctively eats dirt.” The living remain seated around “the mute, the frightening fourth mother.” They exist in a state of shock, but put themselves to work as a “clean-up crew after a memorial, before which all were birthdays.” Later in the collection, Field references a Japanese forest known for suicides, noting phenomena there that haunt visitors who “first blurt out then refuse to speak again of what they’ve seen.” Time cycles; winter comes and “creatures pass through killing frosts and starving times” before emerging once again. Field’s lyrical, personal collection clings to love as the only way “To find a stopping place for the endlessly vagrant self.” (Sept.)