In Yves Joseph's latest book, the poet engages with the idea of poetic imagination and how this often elusive thing can turn the familiar into the mysterious.
In a book where fish are classified as bees and rivers are legal persons, things are not always as they seem. As the title suggests, sometimes taking something apart and rebuilding it from scratch allows a poem to find its true form. Deconstruction contains new works of prose poetry, as well as a series of short poems (poemsBased entirely on verses of other poets). Old sounds interact with new sounds.
Tomas Tranströmer and Ocean Vuong talk about great unresolved love, while Audre Lorde walks with Ahmed the Mallah and César Vallejo as the grass bends, then learns to stand again. As for Joseph's poems, they revolve around language. How lonely she is until time enters the poem and puts it in its rightful place.
