Winner of the Dorset Prize, selected by Jane Hirshfield
Click here to purchase After Urgency from Tupelo Press
The question underlying After Urgency is how to go on—a question that presses even when we can do nothing else—and each poem in this collection posits a hard-wrestled, multiplying answer of gorgeous continuance. Rusty Morrison instantiates idea and feeling in ways unlike any other poet now writing. The intelligence and aliveness here are omnidirectional. Inhabiting extremity with speech’s own vision and musics, Morrison’s image-assertions are uncanny in their inter-mixing of inner and outer, of precision and threshold-awareness. This is a hallmark book of grief and life.
—Jane Hirshfield, final judge of the Dorset Prize
Reviews
- Publishers Weekly starred review
- Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal
- Dean Rader, The Huffington Post
- Alan Felsenthal, Lana Turner
- Ben Rutherford, The Volta
- Selected as a 2012 readers’ favorite work of poetry in The Believer
- “The Particulars of Grief”: Lisa Katz, The Critical Flame
- John Gallaher
- The Lepsa Journal
- Alan Clinton, Reconstruction