prairie)d by Garin Cycholl

prairie)d is a magical meditation on the maps and rivers Cycholl has known on the American plains, and it enters a long tradition of prophetic poetry. It rehearses America’s maybes and could-have-beens, and chronicles its failures. In the poet’s attention, the prairie reads as a wonderful and uncanny ache of American names. It is something that we ‘know’ or something we have heard and never seen. The effect is both exhilaratingly strange and reassuringly familiar.

Mostly, Cycholl proceeds in dismay for the beggaring of his world. prairie)d is the song of a grieving poet. It tells of the water which dribbles muddily through a once-garden and into lives malformed by manias of profit.

—Dennis Cooley, author of The Bestiary and Body Works

Fourth in Garin Cycholl’s Illinois series of long poems, prairie)d joins Blue Mound to 161, Hostile Witness, and The Bonegatherer. This work explores water’s place and persistence in memory. What myths does water hold? What traces of human presence will persist beyond ecological catastrophe? A fading autobiographical map, prairie)d opens conversations between Tiresias, Tyrone Hayes, and human myth, “ahowl and wailing her dead into the current.”

Garin Cycholl’s novel, Rx, is a play on Melville’s The Confidence-Man, about a man practicing medicine without a license in a (Dis)united States. prairie)d is the last volume among his Illinois poems, which include Blue Mound to 161, Hostile Witness, and The Bonegatherer. Together as “local epic,” these book-length poems play with aspects of memory, myth, and place. He and his wife, Shadla, live just south of Chicago.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 92 pages

· Binding: Perfect-Bound

· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] 

· ISBN: 978-1-60964-461-1

$18

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