Knot

Reviews / Votes

Like music, this Knot. What's inside it also the outside. Stacy Doris is careful enough to risk it all-and tie it off. Knot, is making as bequeathing, 'violated, thus wholly inviolate.' That kind of strength. She states at the entrance to this book: 'What follows occurs in a moment; a flash.' This is an articulation of peril which, in order not to perish, performs a momentum entirely original. What stuns is the intensity, how much is captured, how much captures. -- Rod Smith * author of Music or Honesty * Between birth and death, the meandering. Living. Stacy Doris's Knot is Poetry, clear-headed and restrained. 'Harmony and form, each song, these constructs serve law.' This law is a puzzle the cat keeps. Doris's succinct diction records the care where trace recovers. Signs remain, ties bind. So it's timely, Dear Readers, to address this Knot. -- Norma Cole * author of <i>Spinoza in Her Youth</i> * Their paradoxical faith to what's never present makes Knot's anarchic lyrics hum instead of merely sing: apocryphal protocharacters and mock cantos chart out a future as well as a history for themselves and for us, even as they refuse those tenses for the terrorized current of complicity-and they ward away all but faultfully proliferating third persons. If there's a little less oooh baby, more kid as maculated concept in Ms. Doris's latest lush essay in marriage, there's also less privacy here than even before, more imploding within the wound. What's never present is always felt; what's always passing is ever-achingly-contemporary, like the formless definitive cat's disquieting purring, like this langue-twisting that tracks it so closely, bellicosely. -- Jennifer Scappettone * author of <i>From Dame Quickly</i> *