Seattle poet Kary Wayson‘s second collection, The Slip, comes 11 years after her debut, American Husband, which itself came long after she’d been working the reading circuits as one of the country’s most skillful lyric poets.
But it takes a while in the mines to find diamonds in the dirt of everyday experience, and even longer to polish them up with the few tools poetry provides. The time Wayson took to fashion the multifaceted jewels she gives us in The Slip was well worth it.
Both books share some subjects: the paradox of the self (we’re singular, yet we contain multitudes), the lover(s), the mother, the father, aborted beginnings of all kinds, and the way we never stop loving people we’ve loved. She’s particularly interested in how impossible it is to reconcile that last subject with the language we have for love. Words themselves, with their many outs, allow us so many ways to evade commitments.
