Shard

In Judith Roitman's Shard, koan-like couplets stream through the open space of the page like moments in a day, by turns or all at once tragic and comic, vast and infinitesimal, mundane and surreal: They scooped out half your body. / Conglomerates stride the earth. As readers we may ride these moments into our own transient noticings: Oh God it's that bird again / hammering away against the tree. Savoring Roitman's nuanced repetitions and variations in syntax, case, tense, tone, and topic, we may ponder the movement of experience and thought into language: the sounding of words, making of marks, reading and rereading of marks in a process that multiplies meanings: Cows drop / against the knife. // Herons rise / from the fog. We may open toward the all-of-us making gestures, sounds, and marks to send back and forth amongst ourselves. In confusion and wonder, in love and rage, in terror, grief, and awe, with judgments and sometimes beyond them, we may find ourselves here, for now, participating. Bring me my crutches. / Feed me my silk. -- Sarah Rosenthal