No Need to Walk in a Straight Line by Dana Yost

Dana Yost‘s No Need to Walk in a Straight Line is a powerful and ironically peaceful meditation on loneliness, insomnia, and the love (and pain) in memory. With precise language and imagery that stays like still-life photos in the reader’s mind, Yost invites readers to look head-on at disconnection in a young woman “bleeding/down her leg,/but she thinks,/this isn’t me,” or the woman whose only reason for not hanging herself when her husband leaves her is that “if she had lasted forty-five years,/she could last another twenty to thirty.” Yost’s poems are not without hope, however, which he finds in nature, where the river’s current becomes “a mother’s calming stroke/upon the back of the neck.” Throughout this beautiful and necessary book, Yost reminds us not to give up, even in the darkest times: “The world is cold, is turned inward,/and to crack it you need a will as strong as an ice pick,/forever chipping.”

–Marcella Remund – author of The Sea is My Ugly Twin and The Book of Crooked Prayer