The Shifting Line

by Chelsea Rathburn

The Shifting Line by Chelsea Rathburn, the 2005 Richard Wilbur Award recipient, is a remarkably wise and skillful debut. As Catherine Tufariello writes, "The poems in The Shifting Line compel us by their fascination with the precariously shifting boundary between love and aversion, belief and doubt, domesticity and danger." In sonnets, ballads, blank verse, and nonce forms, Rathburn expresses our hopes, desires, and fears, building, as Miller Williams notes, "extraordinary poems out of ordinary language." Such skill is readily apparent in poems such as "Singing the Children to Sleep," where the phantoms and recesses in a child’s bedroom are less fearful than "the terrors we’re afraid to name." April Lindner notes the metaphorical resonance of the book’s title in Rathburn’s ability to chart the depths below quotidian surfaces, to navigate ambiguous borders: "Many of the poems in The Shifting Line explore love's gray areas — how easily a touch becomes abrasive, and how the atmosphere of even a peaceful home can be charged by 'currents we can feel but can't repair.'" The Shifting Line is a compelling collection from a young poet with a nuanced eye and ear and a facility with form rare among her contemporaries.

Genres: Poetry

56 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 2005

About the author

Chelsea Rathburn’s poetry collection A Raft of Grief was published in 2013 by Autumn House Press. Her first full-length collection of poetry, The Shifting Line, received the 2005 Richard Wilbur Award. She is also author of a limited-edition chapbook, Unused Lines, published by Aralia Press in 2003. Her poems have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, Ploughshares, New England Review, and Five Points, among other journals and anthologies, and her prose has appeared in Creative Nonfiction. She teaches English and creative writing at Young Harris College.

Chelsea's poem "After Filing for Divorce" was recently featured in Ted Kooser's American Life in Poetry column at [http://www.americanlifeinpoetry.org/c...].

Reviews

[Bob Canary · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful poems by a promising poet