If One of Us Should Fall

Nicole Terez Dutton's If One Of Us Should Fall is sensational in both the laudatory and literal sense. Her poems are full of exacting language and feeling, the swells and pitfalls of desire, 'the music that swallows us whole.' Her muse is not Orpheus so much as a tenacious Eurydice singing, 'I love that sky the whole way down' even as she falls. It is a new sense of myth and music this blazing debut gives us. Sensory, sensual, sensational: a whole lot of Hot Damn.

The poet's practice is speed and feeling, a sensuous eye roving over its subjects with a hip distinctiveness that announces style and lyrical sentience. Nicole Terez Dutton's If One Us Should Fall is all art song with a velocity of seeing that delights any reader's yearning for a new experience with language, a new doctrine on how to live meaningfully inside the music.

A lyrical debut of impressive breadth, one in which multiple, often conflicting emotions find polyphonic expression.

The book sings. . . . 'If One of Us Should Fall' draws us in, captivates us with its music, and invites us to watch as longing takes shape across various landscapes. In 'whichever direction we cast our gaze— / space we cannot fill, space we cannot leave,' we are there with the poet, immersed in song.