Mortar

In Mortar, Christopher Shipman confronts the legacy of his grandmother's murder and the weight it presses across generations. Moving by accretion-prose, lyric, and fragmented poems, each layering fact, dream, and invention-the collection returns to the brick with incantatory force, at once the weapon of the crime and the figure of its aftermath. "The night is long, I mean generations," Shipman writes, and the poems enact that long night's tension, always approaching the house of the murder, always on the verge of witnessing the violence itself, "like the scene in the movie that scatters birds." Alongside these hauntings, life persists: a father with his daughter, a husband pursuing simple dailiness. Restless, inventive, and tender, Mortar transforms trauma into lyric witness-a fearless book haunted by what it cannot release. -Kerrin McCadden, author of American Wake