
Cloud Builder
Weston Morrow(Author)
University of Georgia Press
Will be published approx. on 1. September 2026
Book
Paperback/Softback
88 pages
978-0-8203-8067-4 (ISBN)
Description
What do we owe the dead? This is the question at the heart of Cloud Builder, in which Weston Morrow interrogates the burden of legacy and the ever-watchful gaze of our deceased loved ones. His search takes him from the landscapes of the late Romantics to the soccer fields and baseball diamonds of present-day Washington State, along the way reanimating figures from his own and our collective past.
These poems reawaken long-dead painters and musicians, collapsed bridges, derelict ferries, and dormant volcanoes, confronting him with his failure, at times, to ask what it is we owe the living. What do the dead want from us? Or, conversely, is it we who haunt "the past, who can't stop turning back / for one last look"?
These poems reawaken long-dead painters and musicians, collapsed bridges, derelict ferries, and dormant volcanoes, confronting him with his failure, at times, to ask what it is we owe the living. What do the dead want from us? Or, conversely, is it we who haunt "the past, who can't stop turning back / for one last look"?
Reviews / Votes
The only thing I wanted to do after reading Cloud Builder was read it again. Morrow gives a master class in how to write a spare, lively lyricism that will speak to readers about fathers, sons, history, place, and how we go on living despite our losses. Elegiac, poignant, tender, and always surprising. This is the real deal: poems that feel and that make you look at your own life and family anew. -- Janice N. Harrington * award-winning author of Yard Show and Even the Hollow My Body Made Is Gone * Morrow's disquieting debut unsettles the myth of artmaking in which artists often hide: that through creation, the artist-and the viewer too perhaps-experiences catharsis. From the specter of an uncle with whom Morrow shares his name, to the unfortunate deaths of both his grandmother and grandfather due to cancer, tormented by the many mistakes a young man makes in life, and in love, these poems are pentimentos: repentant, interrogative, 'each of [them] dancing, up to, and beyond, the edge of ruin.' What Morrow achieves in this collection, ultimately, belies redemption and facile absolution. Instead, Cloud Builder offers us a practice to the otherwise, ever-reflective, always-reflexive struggle toward reconciliation. -- Angel Garcia * author of Teeth Never Sleep and Indifferent Cities *More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Georgia
United States
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Dimensions
Height: 216 mm
Width: 140 mm
ISBN-13
978-0-8203-8067-4 (9780820380674)
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Schweitzer Classification
Persons
WESTON MORROW is a former print journalist who teaches writing at The Ohio State University. His poems have appeared in venues such as Boulevard, The Adroit Journal, and Barrelhouse. He grew up around Puget Sound in Washington State and currently lives in Columbus, Ohio. You can find him online at westonmorrow.com.