Rise and Float

Chosen by Randall Mann as a winner of the Jake Adam York Prize, Brian Tierney's Rise and Float depicts the journey of a poet working-remarkably, miraculously-to make our most profound, private wounds visible on the page. With the &quote;corpse of Frost&quote; under his heel, Tierney reckons with a life that resists poetic rendition. The transgenerational impact of mental illness, a struggle with disordered eating, a father's death from cancer, the loss of loved ones to addiction and suicide all of these compound to &quote;month after / month&quote; and &quote;dream / after dream&quote; of struck-through lines. Still, Tierney commands poetry's cathartic potential through searing images: wallpaper peeling like &quote;wrist skin when a grater slips,&quote; a &quote;laugh as good as a scream,&quote; pears as hard as a tumor. These poems commune with their ghosts not to overcome, but to release. The course of Rise and Float is not straightforward. Where one poem gently confesses to &quote;trying, these days, to believe again / in people,&quote; another concedes that &quote;defeat / sometimes is defeat / without purpose.&quote; Look: the chair is just a chair.&quote; But therein lies the beauty of this collection: in the proximity (and occasional overlap) of these voices, we see something alluringly, openly human. Between a boy &quote;torn open&quote; by dogs and a suicide, &quote;two beautiful teenagers are kissing.&quote; Between screams, something intimate hope, however difficult it may be.