Unrest

The second collection by the award-winning poet Joanna Rawson, whose "intense language recalls the hothouse prose of Cormac McCarthy" (Kirkus Reviews)

The sky threatens to answer a prayer but then won't.
It is not exactly our own minds we go out of.
-from "The Insurgency"

A man's sister sews him into a bus seat. Stowaway immigrants suffocate in a crowded boxcar. The first female suicide bomber passes through a checkpoint. Joanna Rawson's Unrest shows the fervent, if not desperate, side of humanity pressed to the limits. With a resonant lyricism and profound beauty, these poems are restless meditations on American life, political borders, lawlessness, parenthood, and the spaces where the natural world and human turmoil come into conflict. Here is the voice of the poet at one moment in contemplation and at the next in emotional outcry, stuttering into song.