{"product_id":"earliest-witnesses-book-gc-waldrep-9781946482488","title":"The Earliest Witnesses","description":"In the poems of The Earliest Witnesses, witnesses need a place to begin-they spiral off from a walk, a church, an orchard, to go into deeper meditation about faith, earth, restraint, desire, and violence. Waldrep’s seventh collection begins where his prior collection, feast gently, left off: “This \/ is how the witness ends: touch, withdraw; touch again,” according to the opening poem. The status of witnesses is never constant and never settled in this book: sometimes, witnesses “foster,” “touch,” and “stain” the places they inhabit; other times, they befriend, or document, or think. Sometimes, witnesses forget themselves-in questions of blame and responsibility-and sometimes they feel forgotten and unknown. If these are poems of witness, then they are also testators to the craft of seeing: “Can you see this,” the ophthalmologist in “A Mystic’s Guide to Arches” asks over and over again. Here, sight facilitates and impedes desire; it colludes with language itself. “She said, When you say pear, I see p-e-a-r for a second before I see, in my mind’s eye, a pear,” Waldrep carefully records in “[West Stow Orchard Poem (II)].” The desire-poems in The Earliest Witnesses want the thing itself, its image of the mind, and the language that transmutes both thing and image into song.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49573467914513,"sku":"GOR013517481","price":9.5,"currency_code":"CHF","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50402522366225,"sku":"CIN194648248XG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"CHF","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":50993641652497,"sku":"NIN9781946482488","price":0.0,"currency_code":"CHF","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51418209452305,"sku":"CIN194648248XVG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"CHF","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/194648248X.jpg?v=1750836308","url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/de-ch\/products\/earliest-witnesses-buch-gc-waldrep-9781946482488","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}