Risk

Rusty Morrison’s Risk is anchored in the memory of a mother in the “gloaming hour” of a broken world, and in deep ecology:

Dirt more alive than you’d thought dirt could be—small spiraling
worms you see might call down birds, wild and rich in their winged life.

Morrison’s poetics of urban flânerie—which includes encounters with agriculture, film, neighbors, police, news anchors, bank clerks, grocers, and homeless people—is informed by Romantic poetry and song:

[…] Are
there subversive songbirds who
still harmonically do
transmit thou wast not born for
death, but now, along the new
fiber optics? […]

Can you write what isn’t known         to you? Will lyric hear it?

The bravery required “To reach and find the door’s knob in your grip” when “[t]here’s danger everywhere,” and “[t]he worst dangers / are those you can’t predict,” establishes the collection at the convergence of formal and authorial daring. In a post-apocalyptic landscape of historical amnesia, where even memory presents “[a] risk to recall,” Risk reawakens the Modernist salvo to “make it new”:

Acknowledge one place to
seek safety and you begin to see others. Even now
will you reach for the easy metaphor of a seed deep
in soil […]
Will you keep writing only what you know?

In the absence of epistemological certainty, and given the anachronistic nature of ideas in time (“You’ve largely ceased to translate old theories / you depended on into meanings already past their / sell-date before you finish”), Morrison summons “the first poem [she] picked up as a child. Its rotating / orbit of colors and shapes an aperture that’s open / still.” Elsewhere, the poet considers “the images / of William Blake,” which “illuminate / that nature has no outline but imagination has / super-fluid contours that flood the narrow container / that will is making of you.”

The poet’s stance on syntactic limitation “as event, not aftermath,” colludes with the book’s limning of the unknowable. Equal parts postmodern mysticism and documentarian witnessing, this book urges the reader to “write into abandonment,” and “See a world of new lives form,” born of refined poetic sensibility:

Wind

is a workshop of freedoms
that only intuition

turned kaleidoscopic can
perceive.