spotlight: Stone Wharf
Re: Stone Wharf
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.
Advance praise for Stone Wharf
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
Excerpt from Stone Wharf
Hostage
After Katie Peterson
On the night I ended it the police had cordoned off every street surrounding the block to investigate a threat that had been called in on the house across the street from yours. Can’t turn down that road the neighbors had told me before I turned down the road. They pointed at the yellow tape, can’t walk past that van they said after I’d parked and walked past the van and into the back door of your house. The block is surrounded by cops I said over the three empty bottles of white I saw on the table. The police told us to close the blinds and stay inside. You were touching my hair then pulling it. The swat truck arrived. They were talking to the man inside the house, shining a spotlight on the front door saying over the loudspeaker come out the front door with your hands raised and follow the officer’s instructions and we’re here to help you. I watched through the cracks in the blinds of your windows while you tugged alternately at my arms or legs or waist. They are going to batter down the door I said. After they battered down the door they sent a phone inside, then a dog, then an officer, then a few more. He has a hostage in there I said, prying your grip off as you tried to get me away from the window. They cleared the first floor while we were in bed. Nothing could be seen from that side of the house. The voice on the loudspeaker kept repeating we want to protect you. It had been hours. The officers were tired. The sidewalk was a wash of blue light. The door was open and no one had come out. He’s not there I said. I looked at you. You looked at something past me. We both knew he had been gone for a while.