Parallel Resting Placews

by Laura Wetherington

What happens when a poet tries to filter the untranslatable from another language? The rush of unknowing, decoding the wind, the body becomes an antenna. Following behind Jack Spicer's After Lorca and swinging its ovaries, Laura Wetherington's second book uses the concept of translation to create original poems from the work of writers like Liliane Giraudon, Marie Étienne, Dominique Fourcade, and Jean-Marie Gleize. These poems run through a liminal linguistic space where meaning, mishearing, and dreams collide, sometimes midsentence, where they hinge into "My man animal took shape in a shadow, / climbed over an obstacle, / became the void." Interstitial love letters to queer writers process a miscarriage, the most recent election, and queer puppy love. This is a book of yearning—for a foreign tongue, for a body growing inside the body, and for a form of communication that can capture feeling.
"There is a constant textual drama in the address and voice of Laura Wetherington’s heady poems; a mirror staged. With monologues, letters, lyrics, and prose she performs a writing through to a new ground of sensation and thinking. Call it the present. The music is gorgeous and the sound is captivating. Parallel Resting Places is a wonderful book and a welcome addition to a tradition that troubles tradition." —Peter Gizzi

64 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2021

About the author

Laura Wetherington‘s first book, A Map Predetermined and Chance (Fence Books 2011), was selected by C.S. Giscombe for the National Poetry Series. The Brooklyn Rail called the book “humble, folksy, romantic, tough, inventive, and not over-programmed.” She has two chapbooks: Dick Erasures (Red Ceilings Press 2011) and a collaboration with Jill Darling and Hannah Ensor, at the intersection of 3 (Dancing Girl Press 2014). Her work appears in the Minnesota Review, Drunken Boat, Otoliths, Verse, among others, and in two anthologies, The Sonnets: Translating and Rewriting Shakespeare (Nightboat Books 2013) and 60 Morning Talks (Ugly Duckling Presse 2014).

Wetherington co-founded and currently edits textsound.org. She currently teaches in Sierra Nevada College’s undergraduate English and low-residency MFA programs.

Reviews

[Karen Kao · Rating 4 out of 5]

Laura Wetherington is a poet, teacher and editor. Last month, she gave a Master Class for the International Writers’ Collective on poems from her latest collection, Parallel Resting Places. I got to sit backstage during this class and listen in on the conversation. So this book review is mostly eavesdropping on the way a poet like Laura thinks.

She starts by saying that the poems in Parallel Resting Places are hybrid works, shading between poetry and prose, narrative nonfiction and the experimental. She tells us she’s become a poet because writing is her way of processing the world. To document her experience of a miscarriage or to insert herself into a conversation as a feminist.

These are big words. My head is starting to spin. I’m wondering if I’m smart enough for Laura and her work.

To read the rest of my review, please visit my website for Love, Laura

[Hannah VanderHart · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stunning Poetry. Gorgeously queer, and thinky, and in love with translation and philosophy.