Eclipse Season

Eclipse Season is a stunning and restless meditation on a speaker tormented (and seduced) by memory, attempting to orient and reckon in the present moment. Here we have an aching speaker engaged in what is a bold act of lyrical renaming—even if she doesn't seem sure of that task. There is a lifting above this historical self, to map longing in language. Karin Gottshall's poems are threaded with an almost supernatural loneliness, placing her speaker in a tradition of spiritual reckoning through the wound of unsteady attachment to the turned-away parent: the mother haunts the book and the daughter's house. The invasion is paradoxical, as it is also a continuous emotional absence. In this way, the speaker's own loneliness is never her own, is always tinged with another's. Indeed, there are many eclipses in this book, dark objects that block the light, language, sound, meaning, and lack. But this darkness is, as Gottshall understands, a crucial part of the journey forward in language. Ice and fire, wind and animals—these elements of the living world that speak another kind of language, mingle with the ghosting language of the past. Thus, the task is, as the speaker proclaims in the opening of the book, to "empty all [her] language into the fire." For those of us tormented by memory, this is where real work begins: where the "skull grows large with silence." I am grateful for this book's gift of language, as much as its gift of silence. —Bianca Stone