Risk
In Risk, award-winning poet Rusty Morrison uses a constraining form of seven-syllable segments with breaks between to explore questions of limitation. In these poems, she is not just writing about constraints, but living inside and seeing how to manage them. In this way, the speaker of these poems actively experiences limitations as event, not aftermath.
Drawing on the idea of philosopher and critic Hélène Cixous who writes that "the border makes up the homeland, it prohibits and gives passage in the same stroke," in Risk Morrison aims where the border and framings she uses offer understanding and where boundaries should be pushed against and passed beyond, as frightening as that might be.
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"Most of the breath-stopping poems in Risk are defined by strong lineal caesuras--as though the poems were torn open to show 'the deaths you carry within.' And yet, the dominant theme of Risk is bonding--the bonding of a couple, 'Ken' and 'you, 'and the bonding that language might engender. Emphasizing the latter, Morrison asks, 'Could words come that would kin you to others...?' Staggering the conventional fluidity of iambic pentameter, her caesuras generate a meditative pause that serves her characteristically philosophical questioning. Morrison's poems have always struck me with their seriousness, with their aversion to irony, and with their ecstatic merging of abstraction and particularity. Risk is especially concerned with a neglected trajectory of identity politics, one which reminds us of the mutability of identity and its collaborative constructs in our interactions with others and with the world itself.--Forrest Gander
