the last will be stone, too

Poetry. Deborah Poe initiates THE LAST WILL BE STONE, TOO with a cento—a Paul Celan death mix—to "let the grey animal in" and proceeds to sonorously enmesh art and death throughout this dazzling collection. Using art as diverse as Molissa Fenley's choreography and a fourteenth-century wall painting in China's Shanxi Province, Poe opens the page to people, place, animal, and ghost to "enact.a vision of human consciousness contemplating its own end" (Suzanne Paola). As in her collection ELEMENTS, Poe's poems push beyond the materiality that triggers them, connecting art with histories, philosophies, and the crises of our time. This series of poems invites readers to "walk into unknown center | to witness what silence can do." Yet by the collection's end, in pulling at the connective threads at the heart of the unknown, it is life that comes spilling out in transformative flight.

"What is the sound, after the sound of the scream? What details constellate within the heaps that the disaster makes? How might we read or sing them? Deborah Poe writes: 'to walk into unknown center / to witness what silence can do.' Here is a book that embodies these gestures and, with compassion, invites us to participate. In communion with the invisible, reading something where there is (seemingly) nothing, as Poe reminds, a higher pattern forms. THE LAST WILL BE STONE, TOO is a book able to re-attune the senses to the glory and difficulty of the world."—Selah Saterstrom