Forthcoming from Bent Paddle Press

Lee Kathryn Hodge opens "We Make Shapes from Shapes" with the plaintive, imperative line: "Call back to us; relent." The starkness of the language draws the reader gently into the undertow of grief, in this case the grief over three friends lost to suicide. These losses are examined through not one but two double crowns of sonnets ("Horizon" and "Krater"), both ending with a final master sonnet (which uses all of the beginning and ending lines of the preceding sonnets). The structure conveys a sense of retracing steps, of trying to make things fit together, and ultimately to make sense of irrevocable absences. Through the lines borrowed from Linda Hogan and the joining and rejoining of phrases and images, "We Make Shapes from Shapes" mourns the dead while also recognizing and even celebrating that we are fragile beings all living as we must in rooms "made / of flammable matter."

—Rita Mae Reese (she/her) is the author of The Book of Hulga. Her work has won numerous awards, including a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, a Stegner Fellowship, and a “Discovery”/The Nation award. She designs Lesbian Poet Trading Cards for Headmistress Press, is in the bluegrass band Coulee Creek, and serves as the Co-Director at Arts + Literature Laboratory in Madison, Wisconsin.