Bridge

Transit becomes an act of transcendence in Mary Austin Speaker's The Bridge. I love how each section of the book ends almost where it begins, how the world comes as it goes, flash after flash - and just when things begin to blur we "awake to astonishing /geometry," to an awareness that "ascent is only a way / toward another opening." The Bridge limns with unmatched grace the internal and external process of daily passage. -Joseph MasseySuspended between home and the city, which glows abstractly in the background, The Bridge is a timely book in this age when commutes and device-driven inwardness consumes so much of our days. At times casual and at times earnest, the attention to timeand color, bodies and motion, bring heft to these svelte, track-like poems. The conceptual form of the poems echoes that of a train ride-the seemingly mundane opening and closing of the same doors, but at the exit, one is never in the same place as she was in the beginning. Speaker's poems transport readers so deftly, it's quite easy forget just how it was that you arrived.-Kyle DarganMost everything happens around us while we are in between, suspended in our own stories, and ill-prepared to be surprised. Mary Austin Speaker's The Bridge honors the potential for magic as unknowns bump up against one another during the beginnings and endings of so many everyday days: [I]t is not grace that opens / to let us burrow in / it's a chaos of reordering / which of these / is the obstacle / to understanding / how the magic happens. In these pages, we commute through the always now and the always almost,unfathomably lucky to have a skilled poet willing to look very directly and say I see you,riding in the seat next to us. -Paula Cisewski

Mary Austin Speaker is a poet and book designer. The author of Ceremony, which was selected by Matthea Harvey as winner of the 2013 Slope Editions poetry prize, she has also published four chapbooks, including The Bridge (Push Press 2011) and 20 Love Poems for 10 Months (Ugly Duckling Presse 2012) and a collaborative play, I Am You This Morning You Are Me Tonight, written with her husband, the poet Chris Martin. She lives in Minneapolis, where she co-edits Society, a publication project about poetry and power.