Riddle Field: Poems (Test Site Poetry Series) - Softcover

Dew, Derek Thomas

Softcover

ISBN 10: 194890876X ISBN 13: 9781948908764

Publisher: University of Nevada Press, 2020

Synopsis

Winner of the 2019 Interim Test Site Poetry Series Prize

"Dew is an exciting and complex new voice in contemporary poetry." &;Publisher's Weekly
 
The beautifully crafted poems in Riddle Field explore two parallel themes, the impact of the impending destruction of a dam on a small town and the trauma of sexual abuse and eventual recovery from it. This work focuses on the environment, human and physical, in which the loss of nature and innocence is born and calls attention to the many ways we create both intimacy and distance when trauma is hidden or denied. Derek Thomas Dew&;s language is harsh, honest, and sometimes heartbreaking. His poems capture the confusion and fatigue that must be navigated for a victim of abuse to piece himself back together and the internal strife that comes with carry-ing a traumatic secret that can no longer be ignored. 

Rich with unforgettable images and the quiet strength of hard-won survival, Riddle Field tackles the complex process of achieving self-awareness and recovery in the wake of profound trauma.
 

About this title

About the Author

Derek Thomas Dew poems have appeared in Interim, Twyckenham Notes, The Maynard, The Curator, Two Hawks Quarterly, and Hawaii Pacific Review. He lives in Oregon.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

I'M WALTER

Some stretch their legs out and place their feet far to claim domain.

Some keep their legs together and their knees half-topple to one side.

Some cross their legs and are not unpleasant to speak with.
 

I&;ve made towns of fathers out of small afraid boys
 
who peel the stickers off my model helicopters

while my force has no beginning and no end,

an action which has always been a memory

like an average man in a town.

*

I had wanted to give

if not mine when was he 

of my little intensities 

a now I never know

what in the flesh I had wanted

to share until broken like flesh

a fever tans his wrist

rich in dead yawn of a trash truck

moaning through an alley

on the last day of California.
 

                       

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Nevada Press
• Publication date: 2020
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 194890876X
• ISBN 13: 9781948908764
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 78