Living Must Bury

Unexpected in this shatteringly attached poetry is the calm speculativeness with which Josie Sigler regards and relates the objects of earthly passion. Family, beasts, sufferers distant and intimate, the earth itself, all are classified in this taxonomy of want, of tragic history and unanswered wish, and strong, strong desire. You can really feel the desire, here, for an end to suffering. That there is plenitude in language, in churchy yet aleatory rhythms of utterance, sets up a tension readers may feel in their bodies, while reading--between the truth of historical penury and the truth of reading such generosity. Two lines from Sappho and partial definitions from Wikipedia and the OED are in each poem funneled into collage, making the many names of loss.

JOSIE SIGLER's poetry has appeared in Poet Lore, Hayden's Ferry Review, Harpur Palate, and others. Her fiction has been published in Water~Stone, Copper Nickel, and Silk Road. She was a 2007 finalist for The Iowa Award in Fiction and she's pursuing a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Sometimes she writes about the several stranded Mid-western towns in which she grew up and the Maine island she now calls home.