Particulate

Poetry. The obsessions that enkindle PARTICULATE issue from a simple paradox: matter assumes definition by the force of our attention, and yet what attention most keenly illumines is the disintegration of the defined. In such a world, where any resting point is "blown sand, a landscape adrift," loss is a dominant geography. How to live and love against a backdrop of impermanence and devastation is a principal inquiry of Joanne Allred's poems. Their investigations, whether mythic, philosophic, iconoclastic, or romantic, are always grounded in the particular: a seal placenta, a father-in-law's murder, a sprig of Indian paintbrush. In these poems, grace and revelation-from improbable, often homely, sources-are less transcendent than by-products of deep seeing by a poet enraptured of the natural world.