Description:
What do we owe the dead? This is the question at the heart of Cloud Builder, in which Weston Morrow interrogates the burden of legacy and the ever-watchful gaze of our deceased loved ones. His search takes him from the landscapes of the late Romantics to the soccer fields and baseball diamonds of present-day Washington state, along the way reanimating figures from his own and our collective past.
These poems reawaken long-dead painters and musicians, collapsed bridges, derelict ferries, and dormant volcanoes, confronting him with his failure, at times, to ask what it is we owe the living. What do the dead want from us? Or, conversely, is it we who haunt "the past, who can't stop turning back / for one last look"?Brief description: ARIANA BENSON's poems appear or are forthcoming in Poetry, Poem-a-Day, Ploughshares, Copper Nickel, and elsewhere. Recipient of the 2022 Furious Flower Poetry Prize, Benson serves as a nonfiction editor of Auburn Avenue Literary Journal. She lives in St. Louis, Missouri.
Review Quotes: The only thing I wanted to do after reading Cloud Builder was read it again. Morrow gives a master class in how to write a spare, lively lyricism that will speak to readers about fathers, sons, history, place, and how we go on living despite our losses. Elegiac, poignant, tender, and always surprising. This is the real deal: poems that feel and that make you look at your own life and family anew.--Janice N. Harrington "award-winning author of Yard Show and Even the Hollow My Body Made Is Gone"