Toward a Catalogue of Falling

Toward a Catalogue of Falling, Méira Cook's second full-length book, proves that the fall into language can be both graceful and startling. Whether she is rewriting Hans Christian Anderson's The Little Mermaid (as she does in her poem sequence Days of Water), thinking of Breughel's/Williams'/ Auden's Icarus, reading oranges, or offering advice for catching crows, Cook's words are luminous. Language is a character in these poems, along with circus performers, Venetian tour guides, clumsy sons and migrating geese. Cook writes poems that bless hearts turned to salt, and revive the silenced energies of words. Always unexpected, always elegant, this is language that endures.

The poems are dramatic rushes of words, vibrant and intense.... Some are bizarre narratives fusing the wild 'slanguage' of Eliza Clark and Ondaatje-like exotica. for A Fine Grammar of Bones -- George Elliott Clarke