Overview

How can we memorialize our dead? How can that memorialization rend the veil between the dead and the living? In her debut volume, brittny ray crowell sifts through decades of obituaries, journals, and other ephemera to exhume the generations of her family from her hometown of Texarkana, Texas. She preserves her relatives’ stories in writing and in works of collage, a style of archive that layers the past and the present literally and poetically. This unique approach transforms Cord Swell into an altar, an artistically enshrined space where crowell communes with the past and looks to the future. The title poem, in which crowell speaks to an aunt who passed away, poignantly asks, “if there’s any such thing / as paradise . . . / better than the warmth / of your neck . . . / how close am i / to that context of space?” Her question acts as a provisional thesis statement for this collection, a poetic attempt to reveal, redress, and interpret those who came before her, especially in the absence of physical traces. Each poem imagines ways to access family members who have died and calls out to ancestors crowell never met. In the process, crowell demonstrates capacious syntactical range, nimbly leaping from haibun to erasure poems, interviews to sonnets. She also invents forms she calls “grooves,” which are structured as album tracklists. These techniques marry form with meaning, echoing the voices of lost loved ones in indelible verse. Rhapsodic, inventive, and ambitious, Cord Swell establishes crowell as one of the most creative and dynamic new voices in poetry.

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9781324111153

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Reviews

""In this collection, we are in the archive of memory, we are invited into the home, we are offered a seat at the table, and we are family, warts and all, but it’s all love. In this stunning debut, brittny ray crowell’s Cord Swell brings all the iconography of a life fully lived and, remarkably, fully observed into full view, offering poems like heirlooms passed down to us, bolstering strength through every challenge. Her gift to us is that we witness, in text and in visuals, her interviews with the ancestors, hers and ours, and she lets 'a little bit of sunlight hit us' all. No flood or tide can wash away the foundation she lays here; whether in the home or the backyard or out in the world at large, she keeps us on solid ground."" -- A. Van Jordan, author of When I Waked, I Cried to Dream Again ""Open this book and enter a world of haints and snuff juice, of hot sauce and bones, of the musk of menthols and the teeth of ancestors. This book is an altar, a praise song to women (mostly women) who survive—some as witness, some as memory, some as a recipe for gravy. With these poems Crowell offers us something remarkable—a glimpse into a life so rich with its own tradition as to be almost invisible until now: 'anything God / made most folk had overlooked.' Like the rhizome hidden beneath us that connects every tree, these poems reveal how the familiar contains the mythic."" -- Nick Flynn, author of This Is the Night Our House Will Catch Fire

Author Information

brittny ray crowell is an assistant professor of English at Clark Atlanta University, where she teaches courses in poetry and composition. She is a recipient of the Inprint Donald Barthelme Prize in Poetry and the Lucy Terry Prince Prize. She lives in Atlanta, Georgia.

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