Termination Dust - Susanna Mishler

Here’s a poet whose muses are as likely to be bones as ghosts, and who, envisioning an afterlife, doesn’t want an abstract bliss, but wishes that “our deaths could achieve something / like fossils.” Mishler lives in Alaska and makes that landscape vivid and immediate, a place of “sky / squeaky blue as glass cleaner,” where winter is “a vanilla ice cream cone” while spring is “a vanilla ice cream cone melted on the sidewalk.” No less real than the actual geography is the imagination; Mishler’s has a climate both fierce and playful, where a boy “woke and found hoofprints on the carpet; / his dreams had run and climbed everywhere.” Throughout this impressive debut volume Mishler is as hypersensitive as the cat she describes in “that crouching, frozen posture that suggests detection of something / imaginary.” Mishler pounces—and her catches are stunning.