Blade by Blade

This elegiac outing from Laméris (Bonfire Opera) is a testament to indelible love, offering a maelstrom of memory that briefly resurrects those she mourns. In the aftermath of losing her home, she prevails over despair through greater resolve: “my brother died,/ but I’m living twice—no, three times—for me, for him,/ and for my son.” With this magnanimity of spirit, her poems demonstrate a foundation of awe, curiosity, and reverence. She asks, “what if we remembered the shy soul/ in everything...// underdress the world, get close/ to its shiver, rock and spore, river/ and bark, the dandelion’s naked stem.” Through small reveries, the reader is called to mourn beside the poet. The day her son’s organs are harvested, she is greeted by the faint approach of bees breaking a placid silence: “a song/ of arrows—and all at once, I saw them, the one body/ they made, a kinetic cloud at the window,/ those wound-givers, honey-makers.” Wading through the bittersweet, she recalls her brother naming his plants after jazz musicians (Miles, Coltrane, Billie, Mingus, Cassandra) and nurturing them like kin. Wielding a gift for imagery and threaded with philosophical acuity, Laméris’s voice is incomparable. (Sept.)