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The 2019 title in the Chad Walsh Chapbook Series is Christine Gosnay's The Wanderer. Gosnay is the author of Even Years (Kent State University Press, 2017), winner of the Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in POETRY, The Missouri Review, The Poetry Review, New Ohio Review, and Third Coast Magazine, and has featured on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily.
The collection, chosen by the editors, traces a powerful intellectual journey in the aftermath of loss. Co-editor Melissa Crowe writes, “Gosnay’s wide-ranging and incisive imagination draws from realms as varied as mythology, astronomy, and epistemology to dramatize the efforts of a sharp and hungry mind to cope with grief. In so doing, she offers up a vivid, wise, and innovative chapbook that provides immediate readerly pleasures and rewards our finest attention.”
Stopping Alone in Gold Country
My eyes closed by the rapids,
where the leaves course downstream
with the sun, I can smell the soap we used.
The damp grime of the day’s closed hand
sits on me like a net.
We cast ourselves once into the deepest pool here,
where the water is colder than the moon.
Somebody’s horse throws its blond mane
in front of blonder grass.
Rocks bumping forever in greenery near the fork.
Some lemonwinged warbler lands on a stalk in the shallows.
What must it weigh?
When I close my eyes, yes,
everything makes its brief appeal.
But all this is unfamiliar to me.
The past skips its question in my head as it does—
asking me why I left before I had loved—
where the leaves course downstream with the sun.
My jeans pocket is full of lovely rocks
because I will never come here again.
My eyes closed by the rapids,
where the leaves course downstream
with the sun, I can smell the soap we used.
The damp grime of the day’s closed hand
sits on me like a net.
We cast ourselves once into the deepest pool here,
where the water is colder than the moon.
Somebody’s horse throws its blond mane
in front of blonder grass.
Rocks bumping forever in greenery near the fork.
Some lemonwinged warbler lands on a stalk in the shallows.
What must it weigh?
When I close my eyes, yes,
everything makes its brief appeal.
But all this is unfamiliar to me.
The past skips its question in my head as it does—
asking me why I left before I had loved—
where the leaves course downstream with the sun.
My jeans pocket is full of lovely rocks
because I will never come here again.
