Book Launch: Amassing Life with Giulia Bencivenga and Fariha Roisin

Amassing Life is both vibrant and enigmatic. The poems disarm you with naturalness, candor, and insight, and yet their center of gravity also uproots you, pulling away toward something unknown. And there, life begins to fill with itself to a point of disorientation and dread—should you panic or fall in love? Vulgar hearts, seagull fractals, grim roses, the taste of money. You can hear a voice that folds itself inside out, pivoting abruptly, from the antic to the seer, shifting like clouds or shafts of light, knowing even the flowers have ideas. In other words, these are poems about living to die and dying to be alive. They reach from the hidden core of the soul out to the splayed nerve-endings and furthest reaches of the skin, and on outward into some indefinable zone of thinking and feeling. Read this and let the blood flow.