Rise and Float

Chosen by Randall Mann as a winner of the Jake Adam York Prize, Brian Tierneys Rise and Float depicts the journey of a poet workingremarkably, miraculouslyto make our most profound, private wounds visible on the page. With the corpse of Frost under his heel, Tierney reckons with a life that resists poetic rendition. The transgenerational impact of mental illness, a struggle with disordered eating, a fathers death from cancer, the loss of loved ones to addiction and suicideall of these compound to month after / month and dream / after dream of struck-through lines. Still, Tierney commands poetrys cathartic potential through searing images: wallpaper peeling like wrist skin when a grater slips, a laugh as good as a scream, pears as hard as a tumor. These poems commune with their ghosts not to overcome, but to release. The course of Rise and Float is not straightforward. Where one poem gently confesses to trying, these days, to believe again / in people, another concedes that defeat / sometimes is defeat / without purpose. Look: the chair is just a chair. But therein lies the beauty of this collection: in the proximity (and occasional overlap) of these voices, we see something alluringly, openly human. Between a boy torn open by dogs and a suicide, two beautiful teenagers are kissing. Between screams, something intimatehope, however difficult it may be.