Tributary: Poems

by Carey Salerno

From the author of  Shelter , ferocious poems that rail against a community’s bigotry and culture of silence. Tributary  tells the heartbreaking story of family fracture–of sisters’ estranged, a brother excommunicated. Arranged as a church service, in tension with the ubiquitous, mythic river that floods their landscape, these fierce and urgent poems seek to expose the struggles and failings of family and faith, the rigidity of conditional love and loyalty. As they do, they mirror our national systemic crises of Islamophobia, sexism, gun violence, fanatical religiosity, and white nationalism. In Tributary , a woman rejects the laws of the “book of truth” that she is raised under in order to discover and claim her own morality.

Genres: Poetry

65 pages, Paperback

Published April 20, 2021

Reviews

[Courtney LeBlanc · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of poems where the river is everything - the preacher and the congregation, the savior and the sinner.

from Baptism With a Pond in It: "What was the sin, for what to atone / as a child in drenched Sunday robes who wept. / The hope of transformation, and not for the joy / nor salvation, dear father—what arrives / suddenly in a dirty moat, a preacher's sodden bay? / Even the fish won't take up residence. Let us pray. / What's left in the water will not wash away."

from Baptism With a River in It: "Pull the girls by the hair to the river. / Make them speak its water, that sweet dumb speech. // Pull the girls by their heat-pocked hair. / They open murky mouths for its secret / but no secret there."

from River Reduced to Monolith: "River, your story isn't one of a babbling brook / nor are you a baby, crawling through the countryside / nor snake on your belly, sinking between rock. / You are not my vein full of water."

[Gregg Brown · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sweet, open-eyed, and yet hard. Good poetry stuff in here.