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What Nothing
A reckoning with the past, a bargain with memory, and a prayer for forgetting, What Nothing gives voice to someone for whom sadness is more than a feeling; it’s a place of residence, familiar as a home and strange as a sudden storm.
In her debut poetry collection, Anna Meister asks: how do you learn to live in a place like this? For someone who craves oblivion like salt, who knows what nothing is, staying alive is a lifetime of work. She discovers power in recognizing the dark — though naming it doesn’t make it any brighter but provides a way of seeing the shadows and giving them shape. With a persistent tenderness, Meister finds the somethings that lay a path and the someones who will guide the way, as they “queerly [weave] light into all my dark.” This is what we owe to one another: a hand in the darkness, a promise to be there on the other side.
Aracelis Girmay, author of The Black Maria, and a Whiting Award recipient, said of What Nothing, “Stagger, I stagger to meet these sensuous, brilliant poems stirring, now, in my branches. Here, form is shaped by urgency, and images carry their own weather and summon The Gone. Such poems sudden the blood, make new openings in the sense—awakening what poems can awaken across registers and feeling. See: ‘Look how young I was with my silence. Look at the cruel coat it wore.’ And: ‘I know what I’m talking about. / Please don’t die.’ They are so true, so idiosyncratic, so strange that I change shape to read them.”
In her debut poetry collection, Anna Meister asks: how do you learn to live in a place like this? For someone who craves oblivion like salt, who knows what nothing is, staying alive is a lifetime of work. She discovers power in recognizing the dark — though naming it doesn’t make it any brighter but provides a way of seeing the shadows and giving them shape. With a persistent tenderness, Meister finds the somethings that lay a path and the someones who will guide the way, as they “queerly [weave] light into all my dark.” This is what we owe to one another: a hand in the darkness, a promise to be there on the other side.
Aracelis Girmay, author of The Black Maria, and a Whiting Award recipient, said of What Nothing, “Stagger, I stagger to meet these sensuous, brilliant poems stirring, now, in my branches. Here, form is shaped by urgency, and images carry their own weather and summon The Gone. Such poems sudden the blood, make new openings in the sense—awakening what poems can awaken across registers and feeling. See: ‘Look how young I was with my silence. Look at the cruel coat it wore.’ And: ‘I know what I’m talking about. / Please don’t die.’ They are so true, so idiosyncratic, so strange that I change shape to read them.”
- GenresPoetry
105 pages, Paperback
Published February 1, 2021
16 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
February 7, 2021
Beautiful work from a brilliant poet!
March 20, 2021
A truly stunning collection from a deeply original and compassionate poet. For fans of Sharon Olds, Sylvia Plath, Ross Gay, Elizabeth Bishop. Recommended for readers looking to refresh their idea of what poetry can be or looking for accessible entry point into poetry as a genre.
December 1, 2022
This is a stunning collection that is triumphant and lonely and that says all the things I could never properly articulate. What a beautiful and powerful read.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews