In her debut full-length collection, poet Lee Kathryn Hodge captures complexities and contradictions: her interpersonal brush burns from family, friends, and lovers coexist with the uneasy chill of solitude; her lightly sardonic observations slip effortlessly into deep empathy; her worn-down towns spill out into a retreating landscape.

Stone Wharf is evening-colored, yet it shimmers with the light of early morning; it is the feeling of driving all night to a lake you’ve always gone to, but have never learned the name of.

The force of a persistent afterimage, like a ghost of white on the eyelid upon closing the eye to a cloud-mottled sun, burns through Lee Hodge’s Stone Wharf, a debut book filled with the iridescence of an emotional flashfire, its “turf burning underneath” an isthmus of miraculous encounters and situations Hodge skillfully builds up in each poem. One wakes to “the presence of a bird you will never see,” and from this wharf on the edge of tomorrow’s presentiments, moments of yearning and uncertainty are converted into passages of affective tenacity.

—Jose-Luis Moctezuma, author of Black Box Syndrome