Spoke & Dark

There is no word for the place between the dying hand and the living hand that holds it, but there is a space between those hands. Spoke & Dark dwells there, in the tensions that inhere between one thing & another: lost & found, future & past, life & afterlife. Using typographical symbols (#, /, and especially &) to delineate these phantom spaces, Spoke & Dark explores the wild fluctuations in the nature of the known, searching for a language for the unknowable.

Praise for Spoke & Dark:

“Proposal: the humblest part of speech as a principle of cognition. As in the and, the one thing and another. As in the mortal paradox: here and gone. As in the newborn’s foundational gaze, when ‘face seeks / face to fix upon.’ Carolyn Guinzio is far too savvy a writer to make her case with circumstantial detail, the plausible gestures of auto- or allo-biography. She is after recognition of a far more essential, far more demanding sort. And, thrillingly, this is exactly what she achieves, in a book as beautifully crafted and stirringly intelligent as any I have read in a very, very long time. These are brilliant, heartening, necessary poems.”—Linda Gregerson, 2007 National Book Award Finalist, author of Waterborne

“Here is poetry surefooted and supple, ‘wild and delicate/both, how strange.’ A good solid strangeness at the core; a command of pivotal shifts in tonality, guiding the pacing of these poems; an intuitive, understatedly dramatic way of bringing a poem to a close, one that does not cinch or bind (‘the best part is the end, that incidental/silence that shows the rest for what it was.’)–all contribute to a collection that summons up the deep pleasures and rewards of the poetry of Basil Bunting and Lorine Niedecker. A remarkable and startling collection.”—Alice Quinn