Poetry. Winner of the Dorset Prize, selected by Jane Hirshfield. The aftermath of death leaves many of us dumbstruck—turned inward and inarticulate. Having lost both parents, poet Rusty Morrison attempts to find in that shocked silence a language scored by the intimacy of that aloneness with death. Each poem-series in this book of multi-part sequences evolves a new form, stretching every sentence past expectation so as to disrupt the truisms of grief and find affinities in the shifting flux that death discloses. Readers are offered what the poet experienced in the writing process, not relief but a heightened intensity. Beyond elegy, Morrison's new work embodies the volatility of death in life, which mourning allows us to experience."The question underlying AFTER URGENCY is how to go on—a question that presses even when we can do nothing else—and each poem in this collection posits a hard-wrestled, multiplying answer of gorgeous continuance.
