SMALL, BLACK BOX, by Mary Rose Manspeaker

Poetry, chapbook, 32 pages, from Bottlecap Features. SMALL, BLACK BOX is an attempt to describe the grieving self through language that speaks around the emotional core of experience, and the silences of the places we cannot reach. Do the places of memory—hospitals, TV shows, dreamscapes & hometowns—and the stories we tell in some ways become the self? Can poetry aid us in living outside the limited ways we have to describe our lives? The language and form of these poems deconstruct the self even as they construct places it might reside. They resist a narrative experience of identity and grief, examining instead their indefinability and how we live within these spaces regardless. Mary Rose Manspeaker was born and raised in West Virginia. They are a 2021 Brooklyn Poets Fellow, and their recent work appears or is forthcoming in Poetry Northwest, TYPO, Gordon Square Review, and elsewhere.