Chosen by Randall Mann as a winner of the Jake Adam York Prize, Brian
Tierney's Rise and Float depicts the journey of a poet
working--remarkably, miraculously--to 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 father's death from
cancer, the loss of loved ones to addiction and suicide--all of these
compound to "month after / month" and "dream / after dream" of
struck-through lines. Still, Tierney commands poetry's 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 intimate--hope, however difficult it may be.
