LAVA!, by Marshall Woodward

Poetry, chapbook, 28 pages, from Bottlecap Features. LAVA! is a long poem dealing in geology, grammar and the erotic. Its language is ground in soils, clays and marble statues, asking how the world passes and how we might take it back. In its broken lines are a declined Roman empire, the French Pyrenees and the carved rocks of the old world that found their way to New York’s Met Cloisters. It is lunar and terrestrial, subaltern and very much on the surface. In LAVA!, repetition, rebirth and transformation are layered against the sediment of rocks and minerals across episodic eruptions. Grammar becomes the fertile ground through which love is lost, found, impressed upon us. LAVA! gives readers a rhetoric of romance alongside affirmations of love. The poem takes place over eons and the instantaneous, and is really about one thing and only one thing - is there a love, a poem, inside? Marshall Woodward is pursuing his MFA at the University of Houston where he is an Inprint Fellow and an assistant poetry editor for Gulf Coast. He is co-director of Space City Medievalism, a project eliciting creative responses to medieval poetry supported by a Medieval Academy of America Centennial grants. He leads community workshops for adults at Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts and middle-grade students at the Cy Twombly Gallery. His recent poetry appears in Fence, Gutslut Press and Hot Pink.