Dialogues with Rising Tides by Kelli Russell Agodon is promised by publisher Copper Canyon Press to be a volume of work that "facilitates a humane and honest conversation with the forces that threaten to take us under." The poems contained in this volume do just that, providing a textual space for reflection, confrontation, and escape in a strange time.
In poems like "Love Waltz with Fireworks," Agodon holds up a mirror and prism: "all those fireworks, every seventeen minutes, exploding/in my head - you, the baker, you the novelist/you the reader, you the homeless man on the corner" (p. 52).
These words and others like them are an invitation to an imagistic and alliterative transaction of beauty and brutally honest emotion. There is much to enjoy about Agodon's work, and I recommend Dialogues with Rising Tides. We need poetry in days like this, and masterful voices like the one we find here.
This book will be released on April 27. 2021.
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