Bivouac [first edition]

FROM THE BACK COVER In Bivouac, Laura Solomon's poems of hope and heartache break and reconvene endlessly, fabricating ghost maps of desire on the page and in the transfixed mind of the reader. Recalling Stevens's oceanic undulations, Solomon's meditations create complex weather systems of language as their true work of culture, politics, and philosophy methodically ebbs and flows. - Tessa Rumsey "The noose is snug and to the point / that it pretties and offers succor," is the dire paradox that opens Laura Solomon's remarkable first collection, Bivouac. At once sensuous and stringent, necessitous and playful, these poems are willing to test the limits of the lyric in the service of a higher calling: the echo-location of the indicted self within a "trampoline topography" where consumption is the order of the day, where "we pull a map from felt-lined [pocket], eye it and eat direction." Solomon sets a watch in these foreclosed landscapes in order to de-map and reclaim them, to allow for the possibility of beauty, if not of salvation, and she does so in a language that is as deft as it is compelling. - Cort Day