Gramarye

Michelle Pittenger's Gramarye offers us language as magic as generative force. “I won’t write what I know. It doesn’t serve this strange, new time,” she slyly claims, but these rich poems do serve our time, and crucially. Gramarye presents us with a wild menagerie both rooted in myth and old testament magic, as well as grounded in the urgent ills of modern America. Snow leopards and pine trees, saffron and poppy, raven and bee, Pittenger’s poetic attention runs wild across these pages without allowing us complete escape from our country’s cold realities. These poems are spells. Coming out of the word, this genesis explodes into a creative expanse which finds its heart in Pittenger’s ability to unfold pain to fruitful effect. Readers are infused with a fearless kind of compassion in Gramarye which reaches into grief through witness without rest. The collection extends ever expansively outward to “woo this bright unknown” and, by the end of Gramarye, readers are ready to trust in the power of this craft. Pittenger makes witches of us readers.