Ground-truth by Molly Damm

I love the ravishing physicality of the poems in Ground-truth by Molly Damm. The textures of these lovely sentences always surprise. The images are indelible: a rum-colored mountain and a cotton bra and an adze before dark haunt because of their specificity. They burn in the light of the precisely seen and the deeply felt. They have the weight of the body in the morning. They are always real.

–Paul Guest

Ground-truth is a field guide breviary for anyone who feels “the loneliness of being tethered / here” on earth, our island home. Each poem is a signal fire, the poet’s imagination soaring where the grounded body cannot go, conflating the complex crux of our incarnated humanity—abandonment, fear, violence, erotic love, hunger (“our scary appetites”), doubt, awe, gravity—with the Keatsian “viewless,” ultimately unmeasurable, wings of birds, wind, and the great cosmic mysteries, including—perhaps most especially—poetry itself.

–Lisa Russ Spaar, Author of Orexia: Poems