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Field Notes
84 pages, Paperback
Published September 1, 2025
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About the author
EG Cunningham
4 books3 followersEG Cunningham is the author of two full-length collections of poetry, Field Notes (2025, River River Books) and Ex Domestica (2017, C&R Press), and two chapbooks, Apologetics (2016) and Oranges for Venus, winner of the 1br/3bath Editor’s Choice from Tilted House Press (2024).
Her poems, prose, and hybrid work can be found via The Abandoned Playground, Barrow Street, Colorado Review, Fugue, The Lincoln Review, The Nation, Northwest Review, Poetry London, The Poetry Review, Puerto del Sol, Salt Hill, ZYZZYVA, and other publications.
Her original music is available on Apple, Bandcamp, Spotify, and Tidal.
Cunningham was born in South Carolina and raised in Italy and Florida. She lives in Washington.
Her poems, prose, and hybrid work can be found via The Abandoned Playground, Barrow Street, Colorado Review, Fugue, The Lincoln Review, The Nation, Northwest Review, Poetry London, The Poetry Review, Puerto del Sol, Salt Hill, ZYZZYVA, and other publications.
Her original music is available on Apple, Bandcamp, Spotify, and Tidal.
Cunningham was born in South Carolina and raised in Italy and Florida. She lives in Washington.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
October 19, 2025
River River Books hit it out of the ballpark with E.G. Cunningham's Field Notes. I love everything about this book, from the play on the epigraph (Ricoer's "The text is a limited field of constructions.") to the author's black and white landscape photographs paired with prose poems, which allude to a story or stories by way of foreshadowing and circling back, folding and unfolding in changing contexts. Metaphorically, the field turns forcefield, playing field, maybe even battlefield; becomes graspable only to slip away again—something onto itself, almost apart, an image for painful memories and memory's unpredictability maybe. All this happens without ever losing sight of actual places, histories, or references to other artists. Each of the poems is a small, justified "field" in the center of the page as are the small photograph's on the opposite page. The collection is brilliant in its sequence and format and so is each of its beautiful and deeply evocative poems.
Here is how we enter the field/s of poems:
"This field wants for nothing. This field is felt. Not by itself—as itself. Nearby is suburban blunting. There's no hunting in this field, not visibly. Weeds sprout. In wet season, its color is the child of blue and yellow. Its surface turns like swatches: pistachio, algae, emerald. This field is waiting. Watching, I think of matches."
And on page 62, the speaker faces this field again:
"I do not want to own the field. Nor walk through it. Nor pluck from itself any flower. Nor discard anything into itself. Nor leave any trace. The field is itself when I take nothing. Instead, I observe at arm's length. Know horizons this way."
Here is how we enter the field/s of poems:
"This field wants for nothing. This field is felt. Not by itself—as itself. Nearby is suburban blunting. There's no hunting in this field, not visibly. Weeds sprout. In wet season, its color is the child of blue and yellow. Its surface turns like swatches: pistachio, algae, emerald. This field is waiting. Watching, I think of matches."
And on page 62, the speaker faces this field again:
"I do not want to own the field. Nor walk through it. Nor pluck from itself any flower. Nor discard anything into itself. Nor leave any trace. The field is itself when I take nothing. Instead, I observe at arm's length. Know horizons this way."
Displaying 1 of 1 review