Beyond the Chainlink

Poetry. Morrison writes: "Beyond the chainlink, a city is the union between two lovers, never taking place." In this latest collection, her eye is attuned to the ways language both obscures and exposes the seemingly lucid illusions of intimate attraction. How to recognize the past's specters as they beckon and frighten, haunt and call, from just outside the "chainlink" of one's schoolyard expectations of self and other? Though Morrison may assert how impossible it is to escape the constructed frame of past experience, her gift for nuance makes each achingly exposed limitation permeable to our attention. She reports, "Impulse says a little hurt is worth the long, thin fracturing you can use as horizon."