Last Resort

The poems in Kathleen Byrd’s Last Resort leak outward, trilling the beard of an oyster - a litany of questions, a deluge of doubt, an unraveling of place and all that comes with it: colonized land, environmental collapse, and an unknowable future. Byrd writes with tender and elegiac urgency, with ＂restless waters on my tongue.＂ Full of visceral imagery, formal invention, tonal shifts, and fluid emotionality, Last Resort tends to place and familial history through nonlinear time - from a snake moving into a cold river to Byrd’s Oma: ＂back stitch / to something lost / a lineage.＂ These poems are truly marvelous; they ask us to slow down, ever so slowly, so that we may hear each syllable, each creature’s ＂humble grinding of grit.＂