OVERLAND – Natalie Eilbert – poems, Copper Canyon Press, 2023

OVERLAND
Natalie Eilbert
Copper Canyon Press, 2023

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The wrongdoing, the math of it, so often abstract. Or hermetic. I sleep in a dark room where I pretend to sleep and my only light is my seasick joy. It is not right for me to misunderstand. Don’t worry, I only know this now in this undated now that comes before and after reading Natalie Eilbert’s considerate, final, and genetic Overland. If I fail, here, to say what comes during any writing of and, please keep at the very least that I almost didn’t make it through the book as I was taken into a particular sadness in thinking on those who will never read it. I guess it is no small thing to feel as a reader that one is in a good soft eye coming upon an egg that will hatch on sight. Overland is a decentering work, a work of shortlisted patience that checks our fictions and does not fake its wrongdoings to relieve relief. Soaked in the desolate allowances of solace that isolate permission, its verse is blessedly always a vowel away from reliving rescue, and it keeps the skull beneath the light bulb long enough to interrogate every ask. It hurts. Its devastating callbacks pinpoint flaw and fail. Earthly boredom, bodily boredom, the boredom of long beings who belong. Eilbert is serious about play and also about play. As in, we can’t use a name that has a name. As in, invention has no mother. I hope you will see these poems, and in the seeing I hope something is placed in the immediately created left hand of a hallucinating birdlike bird. As in, be carried. Its vision is a song to, and to, the loss of our dual invisibility.

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reflection by Barton Smock

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book is HERE