Labor Day – Rebecca Kosick

Softback

72 pages

Golias Books

ISBN: 9780999431344

In Labor Day — a long serial poem in fifty-six parts — Rebecca Kosick pursues a series of movements in and out of the natural and economic landscapes of the postindustrial Midwest at the turn of the twenty-first century, attempting to incarnate a language adequate to memory, a memory adequate to place. Kosick’s verse modulates from auratic to frank, stately to aching, its presiding recollective mood accumulating like a mist over a warming landscape: scattered homophones peer up through layers of sediment, once-familiar terrain is eroded by diluvial, counterintuitive etymologies. The rhetorical layering of Labor Day is memory’s residue, a "paused emptiness of season" that freezes an instant only to watch it dissolve under charged scrutiny.