turn

In the spirit of the old Shaker hymn, the poems in Steven Schroeder’s new collection turn and turn – from a question Laozi raises to Woody Guthrie’s holy ground, from Chicago to Texas to Shenzhen to Macao, in conversation with poets and philosophers from Euclid and Thoreau to Emily Dickinson, John Donne, Gertrude Stein, Buddy Holly, Lyle Lovett, and others encountered “everywhere there is // an edge. And / everywhere there is // an edge…” Sick and tired of being sick and tired, they take off their shoes, say “amen” to birds and the sympathy of cats, marvel at a red moon in Oklahoma in July, hope “it stays / a long long time // long enough for all that light to fill us with all the madness we need to remember…” They “sing the silences, wait,” stop “for coffee and a moment / of Monk under other / people’s conversations…,” rejoice “in collisions that make light possible / in a world where matter, mostly / dark, mostly passes through / what matters to us, undetected” where “every poem is a dance, / every spring daisy a resurrection” – dancing on the page, “where / fiber and fiber embrace to make // a plane surface on the edge / of the holograph world / we think we / occupy.