The Act of Dying by Lucretia Voigt

“In Lucretia Voigt’s debut collection The Act of Dying, the speaker gently offers this moment of clarity: ‘It is not the darkness I mind/ but the emptiness –/ the missing boots by the door, muddy/ from hiking the ridge, the silent banjo/ locked in its case, growing dusty/ in the corner, the cast iron cornbread pan,/ cold and empty in the cupboard.’ I’ve returned to these memorable lines several times, just to feel again how they are held by their resonance. It’s astonishing to me that The Act of Dying is, in fact, a debut collection, for in these poems live a lifetime of hard-won celebrations—of surviving and ongoing survival, of emotional and spiritual complexity entangled and vital as the Kentucky landscape to which they lay claim. Here the wild and tended language of poetry, so rich with remembrance and the elegiac, remains very much alive.”

–Jon Pineda, author of Let’s No One Get Hurt