Chosen by Randall Mann as a winner of the Jake Adam York Prize,
Brian Tierney's Rise and Float depicts the journey of a poet
working-remarkably, miraculously-to make our most profound, private
wounds visible on the page. With the "corpse of Frost" under his
heel, Tierney reckons with a life that resists poetic rendition.
The transgenerational impact of mental illness, a struggle with
disordered eating, a father's death from cancer, the loss of loved
ones to addiction and suicide-all of these compound to "month after
/ month" and "dream / after dream" of struck-through lines. Still,
Tierney commands poetry's cathartic potential through searing
images: wallpaper peeling like "wrist skin when a grater slips," a
"laugh as good as a scream," pears as hard as a tumor. These poems
commune with their ghosts not to overcome, but to release. The
course of Rise and Float is not straightforward. Where one poem
gently confesses to "trying, these days, to believe again / in
people," another concedes that "defeat / sometimes is defeat /
without purpose." Look: the chair is just a chair." But therein
lies the beauty of this collection: in the proximity (and
occasional overlap) of these voices, we see something alluringly,
openly human. Between a boy "torn open" by dogs and a suicide, "two
beautiful teenagers are kissing." Between screams, something
intimate-hope, however difficult it may be.
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