Fault by Wendy Mannis Scher

Fear pervades this book, as the title, geologic catastrophe or its inevitable potential, suggests. Before and after. Carrying ancient Old Testament misogyny forward with inevitability into current headlines or hospitals, overlaying the man-made with the older natural violences of fire and flood, a human female life knits together with intelligence, inquiry, and an imagistic eye,  a “standing place,” for us all. A place of dread. You should read it.

–Linda McCarriston, author of Eva-Mary and Talking Soft Dutch

Scher’s Fault locates itself in “a zone of fractures along which movement has taken place.” The fractures she speaks of are rooted in the landscape as well as in the social, particularly in relation to the violences experienced by women. Scher’s field notes on these topics swarm and collide along these categorical divisions, exposing their raw edges and the wounds they’ve inflicted, and been inflicted with. Scher is a deeply affective witness, who turns her eye/I in every direction. These are powerful poems that sweep a reader away in their tremendous, flood-like movement.

–Andrea Rexilius, author of New Organism: Essais (Letter Machine, 2014)

Wendy Scher’s keen perceptions measure the faultlines, especially, in human nature.  She exposes our rawness, “pale pink like the nether side of skin/moments before blood ignites the surface.” The poems in Fault offer exquisitely sensitive witness to the dispossessed: “exile’s orphan.” Yet in their compassion (“Can such depletion ever feel full again?”), these poems also create a new means by which to orient ourselves, a gentle and heartening grace.

–Elizabeth Robinson, author of On Ghosts

In Fault, Wendy Scher depicts a world both illumined and vulnerable. Her poems are peopled by strong women from the Hebrew Bible and the American West, as well as survivors. Her characters see the possibilities lurking at the corners of our field of vision, but they bear witness despite the emotional costs. The poet’s gaze takes in both cruelty made mundane and the lives of animals that seem surprisingly akin to our own. In chiseled language, Wendy Scher shows clear reasons to fear and to hope fiercely for the human spirit.

–Zack Rogow, author, editor, or translator of twenty books or plays  www.zackrogow.com