Tangible Terrain by Christy Wise

$17.99

 

In her chapbook collection, Tangible Terrain, Christy Wise engages a sublime friction between her home “ground,” the world she was reared in and the alternate “ground” of the city taken on by her father, a melancholic love letter to the alternate lives that beckon like sirens to the ships of our seemingly secure lives. Wise undermines the glossed exterior of these lives “as we wander among prickly bushes/avoid ubiquitous bees/seem natural/not like long silences over dinner/which make me feel invisible.” As the author lets us deeper and deeper into her life, we see the fears of adults, the dreams and advice they thought best to dispense to their own, manifesting deeper in the family and the poet’s consciousness, until we are released into the embrace and revelation of the natural world as the way to reclaim “our ground.”

–Paul Corman-Roberts, author of Bone Moon Palace and The Sincere

 

 

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Tangible Terrain

by Christy Wise

Paper

List: $17.99

979-8-88838-526-5

2024

The natural landscape of Tangible Terrain is 1960s northern California when rural lands were consumed by houses, streets, schools and the families living and working in those spaces. The internal landscape is that of a girl who seeks comfort in dry grassy hills, eucalyptus groves, a frog swamp, an open field and nearby Richardson Bay as a counterbalance to ominous words unspoken inside her childhood home.

Christy Wise’s poems and essays can be found in Red Flag Poetry, Bayou Magazine, The Dewdrop, SPANK the CARP Anthology 2022 and Upside Down and From Below, Marin Poetry Center Anthology 2020.

Her poem “Tony’s Cocoon” was a finalist in the Julia Darling Memorial Poetry Prize. Christy’s essay “Memory Book” was designated a notable essay in Best American Essays of 2010.

With her mother, Nancy Baker Wise, Christy co-authored A Mouthful of Rivets: Women at Work in World War II, oral histories by women employed in non-traditional jobs during the Second World War.

Fourth-generation Californian, Christy cherishes walks along the Pacific Ocean and hikes in Desolation Wilderness.

 

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