Sum of Every Lost Ship poems by Allison Titus Click here to view Former Automotive Plant on Verse Daily. This debut collection of poems is both fascinated with and distracted by our impending endings and leave-takings, the loneliness of animals, and “how the histories of things eat.” These poems populate empty parking lots and seaside pawnshops and depart from a port at Deadhorse, Alaska. A narwhal gives cryptic advice to those requiring guidance on eulogies, arctic travel, and extracting minerals from ghosts. Allison Titus presents us with quiet meditations on how absence often remains fixed as longing, a red thread knotted at the wrist. List price: $15.95

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Here are the links to reviews for Sum of Every Lost Ship by Allison Titus

Gulf Stream: http://w3.fiu.edu/gulfstream/everylostshipreview.asp

Sycamore Review: http://www.sycamorereview.com/2010/03/poemstories-allison-tituss-sum-of-every-lost-ship/

Small Press Reviews: http://smallpressreviews.wordpress.com/2010/04/18/sum-of-every-lost-ship/

Midwest Book Review: http://www.midwestbookreview.com/bw/mar_10.htm#Poetry

NewPages: http://www.newpages.com/bookreviews/2010-04/index.htm

A review by Jake Adam York on Ron Slate on the Seawall:
http://www.ronslate.com/twenty_one_poets_recommend_new_and_recent_books_poetry

www.sharkforum.org/2010/04/poetry-of-the-week-allison-tit.html

To read a review of Sum of Every Lost Ship in NewPages, click here.

Octopus Magazine

Gulf Coast Magazine

Black Bird Review

 

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Sum of every lost ship, minus its apology

The sea has nothing to say about salt. The bird and its feathers;
the plum and its skin. Even the hairs in the horsehair comb quiver
unmechanic. Even the shore retreats.
I might as well say it:  Behind every blue dress is an ocean.
For each water molecule a catastrophe of satin.
I was a pilgrim charged with fishing doll eyes
from the bottom of the sea. An impossible task
for which there must be some equation,
another way to say Electrolyte is to cell
as rust is to blood. What unit of measurement
besides fathom. Because the river forgets nothing.
Not tourniquets or letters, not gloves not cakes.
By the edge of slipping shore I lower the nets. I wait.
These days everything is easier to forgive.

 

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“Sum of Every Lost Ship navigates what is haunting, strange, and unknowable—grief and disappearances, fragments and histories. Reading, we are deftly balanced on the shores of mystery, a mystery fathomed by a keen instinct for metaphor. Allison Titus is a writer exquisitely attuned to compassion, isolation, and the sometimes overlooked details of this sturdy and tenuous world—goats’ hearts, schooners, cabinets, arctic realities. This is a startling and moving collection.”
—Talvikki Ansel

“The pilgrim heart,” as one of Allison Titus’s exquisite phrasings has it, requires an unmooring, a letting go, into a world marked by passing journeys, passing architectures, almost-lost motels for intimates to get lost in—a hardscrabble world rich with leavings. An internality emerges, sets out, to congress with the obstinate, the creaturely. This poetry’s experiment takes us to the fact that the everyday is also experimental, in that, familiar as it is, it can never, if it is seen intensely enough to be durably writ, be wholly predicted. So fine a lyric sensibility as the reader will find in these poems is all the more compelling for acknowledging the human limits of the lyric, for making hard choices, even refusals, and for never romanticizing omission—i.e., obliteration—but testing it at every step with earthly perceptions. Allison Titus’s Sum of Every Lost Ship presents readers with a striking new poetry, and a beautiful and truly original voice.”
—William Olsen

“We choose / what soothes us,” writes Allison Titus in this intricate collection, and yet I don’t quite believe her; Titus’s choices here are invariably brave and unflinching, thus wonderfully jarring. She pays careful attention, and her sights land on deafening gallops, shipwrecked utterances, waking night terrors. This close-up looking reminds us of our essential predicament—“What we need / is a surefire way to strap the bed / onto the trembling boat,” she tells us—and yet, in Titus’s steady hands, capsize seems not only necessary danger but uncanny adventure."

—Kerri Webster

Allison Titus holds an M.F.A. in Fiction from Virginia Commonwealth University and an M.F.A. in Poetry from Vermont College. A chapbook, Instructions from the Narwhal, is out from Bateau Press. She lives in Richmond, VA, with her huband, the poet Joshua Poteat.

Ordering Information: For a full list of titles, please visit www.csuohio.edu/poetrycenter. Books are available through SPD (Small Press Distribution) at www.spdbooks.org, Amazon.com, and BarnesAndNoble.com as well as many corporate and independent bookstores. For media review copies and printed catalogs, contact Rita Grabowski at 888-278-6473, or 216-687-3986.