Haunch High Snow

Were I of greater birth I would not be here,

but there is no other place for the common, so I drink

sick-sweet honey from the pool of Lethe,

forget who I was,

who I am.

from Î'ÎÎ-ÎÎ'ÎΣ

PAGE 4, LINES 26-30

With precise and haunting language, Anastasia Stelse's debut poetry collection, Haunch High Snow, excavates personal and familial history. Her speakers collect and catalogue memories, people, and bones, in an attempt to understand how they fit together.

While the poems span time and location, the landscape of rural Wisconsin and the house there returns again and again as a central force. 

There, a subtle violence thrums within the silence, an undertow of mortality highlighted by interactions with nature. A hunter feels his shot reverberate as "air and crystals of ice crack from the tree." The children thrust "miniature fists in murky water, pulling up palms / full of mud full of critters."  

The personal in these moments dances alongside the historical with a series of persona poems voiced by a resurrectionist and his network, by gods, by the sacrificed. These poems dig into the present, the past, the intricate threads that hold everything together.

Kurt Lovelace, author of

Halfway Between Everywhere