{"product_id":"9781639551019-meltwater-poems","title":"Meltwater Poems","description":"\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003e\u003cspan class=\"a-text-bold\" data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eA haunting collection that inhabits a disquieting future where fear is the governing body, “the organ and the tissue \/ and the cell, the membrane and the organelle.” \u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\u003cspan data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e“Once there were oarfish, opaleyes, olive flounders. Once the oxbows were not overrun with nitrogen.” Part requiem, part bedtime story, \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan class=\"a-text-italic\" data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eMeltwater\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e narrates the awful possibility of doom as well as the grim temptation to numb ourselves to it. Prose poems melt into erasures, erasures swell into lush catalogs. Within this formal ebb and flow, Claire Wahmanholm explores both abundance and annihilation, giving shape and music to our shared human anxieties. What does it mean to bring children into a world like this one? A world where grenades are “the only kind of fruit we can still name”? Where “lightning can strike over \/ and over without boredom or belief and nothing \/ is saved”? Where losses, both ecological and personal, proliferate endlessly? \u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\u003cspan data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eHere, a parent’s joy is accompanied by the gnaw of remorse. And yet, Wahmanholm recognizes, children bind us to the world—to its missiles and marvels, to the possibility that there is indeed grace worth “suffer[ing] the empty universe for.”\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\u003cspan data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eIf we are going to worry, let us also at least wonder. If we are going to be seized by terror, let us also be “seized by the topaz sky and the breeze through it.” A glittering, kinetic testament to vanishing—of biodiversity, of climate stability, of a sense of safety—\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan class=\"a-text-italic\" data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eMeltwater\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e is both vindication and balm.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Milkweed Editions","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":41239899242632,"sku":"9781639551019","price":27.99,"currency_code":"AUD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0371\/3443\/4440\/products\/meltwater-poems-9781639551019-763439.jpg?v=1691484026","url":"https:\/\/littlelostbookshop.com.au\/products\/9781639551019-meltwater-poems","provider":"The Little Lost Bookshop","version":"1.0","type":"link"}