Shearsman Books

Paperback, 88pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781905700547

A second collection, and first from Shearsman Books, by this Brooklyn-based poet, artist and small-press publisher.

While Torchwood documents the loss of a religion and at times, the loss of language, it gathers hope as it goes. The mostly serial works in this collection explore the possibility of faith in humanity — colleagues, classmates, strangers, lovers — attempting a language of clear-seeing and shared spirit. A poetry of inner and outer worlds, of the diary and of the subway, Torchwood moves between the sentence and its trust in storytelling, and the fragment — evidence of the need to create silence in order to tell.

"In Jill Magi’s Torchwood, various forms are employed, including a set titled 'Religious Sonnets' and the 'sudden silk' of a looser more disarranged writing in which 'whorled/ imbricate prayers/imagine edges.' She writes, 'writing grafts onto a life' and working itself out in the space provided, Magi’s thread-like capillary tracings proceed from 'flipping gold-edged pages, the perfume wafts up' toward the enveloping horizon of 'what has eclipsed us'. With echoes of Stein and Scalapino, these poems have an integrity and intensity and seem scraped and tinted from a private repository of tonal "responses to migration". —Kimberly Lyons

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