Night Ride Home by Kara Dorris

excerpt from Night Ride Home:

A YOUNG WOMAN LEARNS ABOUT MIGRATION

We used to break chapels
at least into church steeples
to see where swallows go
to learn how to vanish winter nights

We didn’t understand migration until
we lit up those empty watchtowers
like fireplaces, until
we felt extreme fear/disappointment/love
to the point of nothing

Winter nights, we learned, turned snow
& sleet to black ice, so still
we couldn’t help sliding into damage

Those nights of rum & coke
the first sour-sweet lick
of a frozen margarita, blood/snow
like inside/out
The way melting turns everything
into what it doesn’t want to be:
salvage reclamation

We learned sliding in dark winter nights
feels like standing still

Still, we haven’t learned enough
from swallows, why we return to scenes
of destruction or try to plough seashores
why migrating to & away
makes the summer sun-tea
that much sweeter

Rating: ***** [5 of 5 Stars!]

“In Night Ride Home, Kara Dorris takes us on a journey over the broken glass of memory to a place we find we never reach and yet can never leave. It is here, among the barn fires and flying nails of home, that death and dissolution in the family challenge the poet to negotiate what to reject, what to embrace, what to accept as beyond her power to change. These poems, so thoroughly authenticated through their figurative intensity and wide gaze, move with alarming speed and surprise, as if it were movement itself, the will to move, that offered consolation; as if, when imagination’s child walks, she knocks “her bones together into song.””

–Bruce Bond

“Church-haunted, mall-lonely, wild, sacred, and scarifying, Kara Dorris’ Night Ride Home is a Texas-sized road trip through the plains and by-ways of the American psyche—small town girls, salesmen, broken families, night-sky longings, and burnished backwater dreams. It’s a lyric, a lament, and a book you won’t be able to put down. Dorris’ voice is gorgeous—supple and sneaky, and once it gets hold of you, it doesn’t let go. She is one of our most gifted young poets.”

–Sheila Black

Rating: ***** [5 of 5 Stars!]