The Crocus & I, by Carissa Coane

Poetry, chapbook, 20 pages, from Bottlecap Features. The Crocus & I is a luminous and unflinching collection that tenderly charts both the fragmentation of self and the quiet, radical work of reassembly. Each poem opens a door into the liminal, pulsing with quiet urgency and radiant strangeness. Throughout the collection, the body and the page become shared landscapes of healing and recovery. At once tender and incisive, the poems in The Crocus & I gesture toward what’s been lost and obscured, yet also offer a path through the wreckage: a way of speaking, however haltingly, toward clarity. These poems open up a space where grief, fear, and tenderness can coexist, rearranging our inner topographies with uncanny precision. The Crocus & I is a sustained meditation on the fragmentation of identity and the porous boundaries between the real and the imagined. Threaded through these poems is a profound reckoning with origin and inheritance. These are poems of becoming and unbecoming, of turning over every fragment in the hope that it might reveal something whole. Carissa is a poet from Southern California. Her poetry and journalism has been recognized by the Pulitzer Center, the Bergen International Literary Festival, and the European Cultural Foundation, among others. She is on staff at Asymptote Journal and EdSource, and currently serves as a youth advisor for both PEN International and PEN Norway. Her poems have appeared in various publications and anthologies.