Elegy for the Builder's Wife

If maps are documents of distance, then Nick Courtright’s Elegy for the Builder’s Wife is an atlas. Each poem in the collection can complete a chronicle the surveyor’s work cannot — the territories of fog, how trees can become landmarks, the continents chipped from paint. Courtright, navigating the same terrain as Lorca, finds icons of longing, passion, and sacrifice in the liminal spaces, and in the process, he charts what, for the mapmaker, is impossible — the incomplete, the rended, and the influence of time on everything, still or in motion.