Riddle, Fish hook, Thorn, Key

Poetry. The poems in RIDDLE, FISH HOOK, THORN, KEY invite readers to encounter what doesn't stay still. The longing here is not only to see things—the bones of a whale, a forgotten handkerchief, muddy horses in a field—but to inhabit them, to enter the well of other lungs, to journey into the throat of another land. These poems search for ways to belong in the world. As they do so, the fleeting and uncertain become illuminated, and intimate. "'There is a slide of time/ over time' writes Kelly Terwilliger in her first full length collection, RIDDLE, FISH HOOK, THORN, KEY, where her poems open, yield and merge with the imagery of the natural world they often embody, a porousness which extends to memory, how it slides over its losses until the grief of past is present, recovered, both revisited and transformed. What I love, and what each reading of Terwilliger's transcendent poems reveals, is the lack of the absolute. This poet follows, wonders if she has the right to get so close to the edge, then follows again, wanting what is watery, dissolving, transparent as the threshold between self and world her poems invoke with disarming radiance again and again."—Maxine Scates