The Open Hand of Sky by Connie Wasem Scott

The Open Hand of Sky offers readers a litany of brutal loss—of family members, of friends, of relationships, and of the sand-like ephemerality that is our living. There are several razor-like elegies, as well as desperate list poems of those impossible projects we are compelled to undertake: To Protect, To Bring Back, To Help. Simply, this book confronts what is like to live in a world where the sun is “like a toppled streetlight,” where the haunting bond with a lost brother is stronger than science; there are poems of slaughterhouses and hospices, the gut blow of losing our loved ones in a flash (“Death’s quick like that”) and the slow slipping away that takes on the quality of dream and memory (how “waves take . . . the beach / one handful / of sand at a time.”)  But let me be clear:  in this memorable collection, Wasem Scott also gives us celebratory poems—of shining stars, of the birth of a daughter, of the round glory of blueberries, of new lovers, even of cashews, and, of course, the daily giving that is the sun, a star “brighter than our lives.”

–Tod Marshall, author of Dare Say, The Tangled Line, and Bugle

The poems in The Open Hand of Sky bear unflinching witness to significant passages in the speaker’s life—loss of a loved brother to meningitis, the unraveling of a marriage, birth of a daughter and its subsequent waves of tenderness and fierce protectiveness, and the aging and loss of parents. Underlying all of this, however, is the poet’s exquisite attunement to the natural world, which renders her at once a perceptive witness and an animal-self easily fused with rock, tree, sun, and desert, inseparable from the elements in their sometimes-patient, sometimes-violent manifestations, and ever sustained by the force of her attention.

–Leslie Ullman, author of The You That All Along Has Housed You, Progress on the Subject of Immensity, and Slow Work Through Sand

I so admire the spirit in The Open Hand of Sky that clearly wants to – and does! – make beautiful poems, both in the midst of trouble and out of it. Teetering between the everyday and the metaphysical, Wasem Scott’s poems feel miraculously full, brimming with a fresh luminosity of the physical world. The poems seem pressured into being by all that’s fleeting, and reading them, we may find ourselves at that juncture of time and timelessness, where “Tomorrow / appears like a stranger / peeking through the drapes.”

–Nance Van Winckel, author of The Many Beds of Martha Washington, Our Foreigner, and Book of No Ledge