How to Keep Things Alive by Beth Gordon
How to Keep Things Alive by Beth Gordon
In her latest chapbook, How to Keep Things Alive, Beth Gordon continues to explore themes of loss and grief, this time through her relationships with the living and the dead. How does one show up as a child, parent, grandparent, sibling, friend, or lover with the inevitability of death looming behind every corner of life? Are fearless love and joy still possible after loss, both expected and unexpected? Are memory and language enough to raise the dead or exorcise the guilt of our choices “necessary and wrong?” Using a variety of poetic forms and often surreal imagery, Gordon asks these questions but never offers the reader an answer. These poems beseech the universe, but the universe is silent.
Publisher: Split Rock Press
ISBN: 978-1735483955
Release date: November 1, 2023
Page count: 32
Size: 6 x 9
Format: Paperback
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Beth Gordon is a poet, mother, and grandmother currently living in Asheville, NC. She is the author of Morning Walk with Dead Possum, Breakfast and Parallel Universe (Animal Heart Press), Particularly Dangerous Situation (Clare Songbirds Publishing), This Small Machine of Prayer (Kelsay Books), and The Water Cycle (Variant Literature). Beth is Managing Editor of Feral: A Journal of Poetry and Art, Assistant Editor of Animal Heart Press, and Grandma of Femme Salve Books. You can find her on Twitter and Instagram @bethgordonpoet.
PRAISE for HOW TO KEEP THINGS ALIVE
Once again, Beth Gordon demonstrates poetry’s capacity to strange time, to hold us suspended in the liminal space between “now and never.” This collection proposes a new method of survival, a way of life that requires us to stay grounded in the present and to notice everything. Gordon’s practice of observing is ceaseless, vigilant, nearly obsessive. But in a world where the past is weighed down with grief, and uncertainty and hopelessness bloom in the future, Gordon asks us to simply open our eyes. Sometimes the spider on the ceiling is the only reminder we have that we’re still here, still alive.
— Taylor Byas, author of I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times
Beth Gordon’s How to Keep Things Alive takes our blood and breath captive. From the holy textures of childhood memory to the immemorial incantations of spiders, sparrows, and daisy chains, this “unearthly message of witness and light” presents a brilliant taxonomy of survival, grief, and grace. This collection is rich and incandescent—Gordon at her absolute best.
— Tara Stillions Whitehead, author of They More Than Burned
Beth Gordon’s collection How to Keep Things Alive is a spectacular weave of intimacy and grit. Here, the soft hues of honeysuckle and peppermint vines mix with “the last drop of whiskey” and whichever “sin lit up [our] chart like a vine.” Like memory, or what we have loved for so long, Gordon’s words will course through our bodies and dance across our skin—that “amplifier of memory”—with a song that is incantatory in its brilliance and as damning as “all the things you tried to tell me.” It is rare to find a collection of poems that holds such tender beauty amidst the deeper pangs of what we have not forgotten. We ache for and from the past she has gifted to us.
— Jared Beloff, author of Who Will Cradle Your Head
