Rock That Is Not a Rabbit, The

Finalist, 2024 The Writers League of Texas Award for Poetry | Finalist, 2024 The Burdine C. Johnson Award for Best Book of Poetry from the Texas Institute of Letters

Change arises as something both desired and mourned in poems that reckon with a world where perspectives blur, names drift “billowing, unattached,” and language yields a broken music. A statue of Lenin topples in a Georgian square only to be raised again in a Dallas backyard. Antlers sprout from Actaeon’s head, rendering him unrecognizable to the dogs he loves. Ungainly piano notes pour from a window and wake unexpected wonder in a lost walker. A forest grows inside a box that once held a father’s new pair of shoes. Skylab slips from its watchful orbit and careens toward Earth. A familiar chair once owned by a now absent family appears in a field of wild parsnips. Meditative and richly imaginative, these poems cast and recast the self and its relation to other selves, and to memory, history, power, and the natural world.

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The otherness of the natural world shimmers into view, into consciousness, and so does the city that encroaches upon it, in Corey Marks’s bold, Stevensian, textured memories and meditations. This full-bodied book is an enlargement of experience.

Edward Hirsch, author of The Heart of American Poetry

What a strange and unexpected book Corey Marks has written, a book in which thinking allows the poem to approach real and genuine feeling. How gently it refreshes our perceptions of reality, reminding us of the loneliness of the imagination in an uncanny, but human-scale, poem like ‘Horse Headed Boy.’ With a deceptively plain style that branches into introspection as dense as a wood, the poet registers the consequences of silence, personal and cultural, the endless and terrifying sublime of ‘the warren / of what I hadn’t said.’ This is a meditative book, a book in which a kind of concentrated thinking can feel light as snow as it buries you with implication. It conjures up a world of American houses in which no one has the courage to say what needs to be said, American landscapes in which we go to figure out what those things are, and finally, American thresholds in which some measure of honesty might eventually be (painfully and beautifully) possible.

Katie Peterson, author of Life in a Field

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