Rock That Is Not a Rabbit, The

Finalist, 2024 The Writers League of Texas Award for Poetry | Finalist, 2024 The Burdine C. Johnson Award for Best Book of Poetry from the Texas Institute of Letters

Change arises as something both desired and mourned in poems that reckon with a world where perspectives blur, names drift “billowing, unattached,” and language yields a broken music. A statue of Lenin topples in a Georgian square only to be raised again in a Dallas backyard. Antlers sprout from Actaeon’s head, rendering him unrecognizable to the dogs he loves. Ungainly piano notes pour from a window and wake unexpected wonder in a lost walker. A forest grows inside a box that once held a father’s new pair of shoes. Skylab slips from its watchful orbit and careens toward Earth. A familiar chair once owned by a now absent family appears in a field of wild parsnips. Meditative and richly imaginative, these poems cast and recast the self and its relation to other selves, and to memory, history, power, and the natural world.