Finalist for the 2021 Housatonic Book Award in Poetry
"The thin knife that severed your tumor," writes Brooke Matson in these
poems, "it cleaves me still." What to do when a world is
split--terribly, wholly--by grief? When the loss of the beloved
undermines the most stable foundations, the most sacred spaces, of that
world? What else but to interrogate the very fundamental principles
themselves, all the knowns previously relied on: light, religion,
physical matter, time?
Often borrowing voices and perspectives from its scientific
subjects, In Accelerated Silence investigates the multidimensional
nature of grief and its blurring of boundaries--between what is present
and what is absent, between what is real and imagined, between the
promises of science and the mysteries of human knowing, and between the
pain that never ends and the world that refuses to. The grieving and the
seeking go on, Matson suggests, but there comes a day when we emerge,
"now strong enough / to venture out of doors, thin // and swathed in a
robe," only to find it has continued "full and flourishing and larger
than before."
Sensual and devastating, In Accelerated Silence--selected by Mark Doty
as winner of the Jake Adam York Prize--creates an unforgettable portrait
of loss full of urgency and heartache and philosophical daring.
