DERELICTION

Poetry. The Song Cave, 2022. Paperback, 104 pages. 5.5" x 7.5"

From NMB: Dereliction is divided into two halves, each composed of wonderfully idiosyncratic poems. The book begins with the strange, mystical, mythical, and absolutely stunning long poem “Murmurs.” These murmurs—appearing as sparse lines atop the ample white space of each page—capture striking rituals and events that blur the line between the ancient and the contemporary. The menagerie of poems in the second half employ a variety of invented forms, meditating on the speaker’s life with great spirit, rebelliousness, and acuity. A book for those fascinated with the sacred and how it emerges from the mundane.

From the press: A captivating Debut Collection of Poems by Gabrielle Octavia Rucker.

DERELICTION, Gabrielle Octavia Rucker's debut collection of poetry, moves through childhood and into the afterlife with poems that evoke an artful and urgent sense of the author's "insatiable wandering." With cinematic imagery and formal variation, these poems effortlessly find dream-life and myth transforming the daily actions of talking on the phone or finding your reflection in the window. The bracing intimacy of Rucker's voice invites us into a precise and carefully constructed world in which we are asked to question what it means to “do the human things,” and where the poet eventually asks the reader, and possibly poetry itself, "What bloody lens holds firm between this mystery & us?"