Gloss by Christiane Heggan

Gloss by Christiane Heggan

In Ida Stewart's debut collection GLOSS, the book's Appalachian setting and mountaintop-removal theme play out in language itself, giving voice to the mountain, and considering the delicate relationship between humans and nature.

Like the Appalachian mountain setting from which GLOSS arises, the language in this collection is in flux, full of paradox and thresholds, each word and line a peak or a range. The poems are mined from the ruptured and fragmented rock and dirt of the colloquial, creating a kind of landguage or langscape. Indeed, the poems (mis)behave like little ecosystems, in which word-play, rhyme, and enjambment simultaneously make and break sense, join and repel--evoking the tensions between progress and resistance. Embedded among the strata of Gloss is loss: many poems respond to mountaintop removal coal mining, which is literally flattening the rich complexity of the Appalachian landscape and culture. As the poems give voice to the mountain-top, they consider the delicate relationship between humans and nature, lover and beloved, as well as the natural complexity of communication and utterance, the struggle to say the unsayable.

Ida Stewart's marvelous debut is pitch-perfect whether one thinks of pitch as a reference to the extraordinary qualities of sound here, or a reference to the velocity of this poet's verbal curveballs and changeups. Even the recurring image of mountains comes to represent pitch as the slope between gravity and levity, mayhem and harmony. Few poets combine such a musical ear with such transfixing insights and associations. Gloss is a brilliant and endlessly resonant first book.--Terrance Hayes

Think Marquez in Appalachia, Kay Ryan at a strip mine, and you still won't have the whole of this brilliant book. In Gloss, Ida Stewart makes magic out of a mountain, out of a childhood lived in West Virginia and the relentless pillaging of that land by commercial interests--and never does she compromise her art with clich or polemic. Conscientious, charming, cunning, and complex: Gloss is a significant poetic debut.--Kathy Fagan

Even at her most playful, Ida Stewart brings deep feeling and serious insight to the page as she propels her readers from poem to poem.--Nick McRae

Musical and deeply rooted in a sense of place, Ida Stewart's debut poetry collection highlights the essential element of sound within contemporary poetry.--Alyse Bensel

Poetry. Women's Studies.